Madrid on the move: Feeling modern and visually aware in the nineteenth century 9781526144379

Citation preview

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Madrid on the move

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Series editors: Anna Barton, Andrew Smith Editorial board: David Amigoni, Isobel Armstrong, Philip Holden, Jerome McGann, Joanne Wilkes, Julia M. Wright Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century seeks to make a significant intervention into the critical narratives that dominate conventional and established understandings of nineteenth-century literature. Informed by the latest developments in criticism and theory the series provides a focus for how texts from the long nineteenth century, and more recent adaptations of them, revitalise our knowledge of and engagement with the period. It explores the radical possibilities offered by new methods, unexplored contexts and neglected authors and texts to re-map the literary-cultural landscape of the period and rigorously re-imagine its geographical and historical parameters. The series includes monographs, edited collections, and scholarly sourcebooks. Already published Engine of modernity: The omnibus and urban culture in nineteenth-century Paris Masha Belenky

Margaret Harkness: Writing social ­engagement 1880–1921  Flore Janssen and Lisa C. Robertson (eds)

Pasts at play: Childhood encounters with history in British culture, 1750–1914 Rachel Bryant Davies and Barbara Gribling (eds)

Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture, 1890–1915: Re-reading the fin de siècle  Victoria Margree, Daniel Orrells and Minna Vuohelainen (eds)

The Case of the Initial Letter: Charles Dickens and the politics of the dual alphabet Gavin Edwards Spain in the nineteenth century: New essays on experiences of culture and society Andrew Ginger and Geraldine Lawless Instead of modernity: The Western canon and the incorporation of the Hispanic (c. 1850–75) Andrew Ginger Creating character: Theories of nature and nurture in Victorian sensation fiction Helena Ifill

Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and ­afterlives  Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne (eds) The Great Exhibition, 1851: A ­sourcebook  Jonathon Shears (ed.) Interventions: Rethinking the nineteenth century  Andrew Smith and Anna Barton (eds) Counterfactual Romanticism  Damian Walford Davies (ed.) Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian ­cartoonist  Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin and Julian Waite

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Madrid on the move Feeling modern and visually aware in the nineteenth century Vanesa Rodríguez-Galindo

manchester university press

Copyright © Vanesa Rodríguez-Galindo 2021 The right of Vanesa Rodríguez-Galindo to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 4436 2 hardback First published 2021 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Emilio Sala, ‘Nuevo Mundo de hoy!’, Nuevo Mundo, 217 (2 March 1898). Biblioteca Nacional de España.

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Contents

List of figures vi Acknowledgementsxii Introduction: Decentring modernity 1 1 Seeing in the city: visually aware citizens 26 2 Making modernity: images, words, and cross-national connections 78 3 Strolling the city: the flâneur interrupted 128 4 Sketching social types: local contexts, modern customs, visual traditions163 5 Creating hybrid surfaces: truth, representation, reality/­illustration, caricature, photography 212 Conclusion255 Bibliography262 Index285

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

List of figures

Leonardo Alenza, ‘Gritos de Madrid. El ciego’, Semanario Pintoresco Español, 16 (21 April 1839), 125 (Biblioteca Nacional de España) 30 1.2 Advertisement for Salón de Limpia-botas de Agustín Riquer, El Mundo Cómico, 4 (April 1872), 8 (Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa Histórica. Creative Commons (CC) licence) 31 1.3 ‘El ciego de la noria’ (The waterwheel blind man), postcard, ca. 1900. Colección Cánovas, serie C (collection of the author)32 1.4 ‘The Pictorial Spirit of the European Illustrated Press’, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1040 (4 September 1875), 440 (courtesy of HathiTrust. hathitrust.org) 39 1.5 La Iberia, 7676 (7 October 1881), 4 (Biblioteca Nacional de España)42 1.6 ‘Sala donde se halla la instalación de nuestro periódico, en la Exposición Literaria y Artística, – de fotografía de Laurent’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 1 (8 January 1885), 4 (courtesy of HathiTrust) 48 1.7 Eduardo Sojo ‘Demócrito’, ‘El legado de los conservadores’, El Motín, 1 (10 April 1881), 2–3 (Biblioteca Nacional de España)51 1.8 ‘Palacio de Buenavista’, Semanario Pintoresco Español, 8 (1 May 1836), 41 (Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa Histórica. Creative Commons (CC) licence) 53 1.9 Jean Laurent y Cía, Palacio de Velázquez en el Retiro, ca. 1880–1900. Gelatin glass negative. (Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España, Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte) 54 1.10 ‘La Exposición de Minería. Parque de Madrid – Exterior del Pabellón Central (De fotografía de Laurent)’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 21 (8 June 1883), 1 (courtesy of HathiTrust)55 1.1



List of figures vii

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

1.11 Juan Comba, ‘Viaje del S.M. el Rey a Aranjuez’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 25 (8 July 1885), 4 (courtesy of HathiTrust)56 1.12 Francisco Hernández Tomé, ‘Madrid – Vista general de la Puerta del Sol (dibujo del Señor Tomé’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, supplement no. 1 (5 January 1871), 20–1 (courtesy of HathiTrust) 58 1.13 Jean Laurent y Cía, Madrid. Vista general de la puerta del Sol, ca. 1860–70. Photograph, albumen print on paper (Biblioteca Nacional de España) 60 1.14 ‘Funerales del Excelentísimo Sr. Cardenal Moreno: Paso del cortejo fúnebre por la Puerta del Sol – (de fotografía de Laurent)’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 3 (8 September 1884), 137 (courtesy of HathiTrust) 61 1.15 Emilio Valverde y Álvarez, Plano de Madrid, ca. 1880–89. Map, 70 × 60 cm. (Madrid: Lit. A. Fortuny) (Biblioteca Nacional de España) 63 1.16 ‘Estados Unidos – Tipos y costumbres populares. Nueva York – Movimiento en el “Broadway”’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 8 (28 February 1875), 136–7 (courtesy of HathiTrust) 65 1.17 José Pilar Morales, Planos parciales de los barrios que ­comprende cada uno de los distritos de Madrid con las reformas de la población hechas hasta el día y otros datos estadísticos interesantes trazados con arreglo á [sic] la última demarcación oficial del Excmo. Ayuntamiento. Tercer distrito Centro (Madrid: Imprenta y litografía de Nicolás González, 1880), 22–3. Map (Biblioteca Nacional de España) 67 2.1 Manuel Scheidnagel, Vocabulario de los idiomas francés, inglés y español: compuesto de todos los vocablos, verbos y adjetivos que se relacionan comúnmente [sic] para la mejor inteligencia de los tres idiomas (Madrid: Establecimiento tipográfico de R. Labajos, 1879), 119 (Biblioteca Nacional de España)  85 2.2 La Moda Elegante, 32 (30 August 1871), 252–3 (Biblioteca Nacional de España) 87 2.3 Manuel Luque, ‘Modismos del lenguaje’, El Mundo Cómico, 77 (19 April 1874), 4–5 (Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa Histórica. Creative Commons (CC) licence) 91 2.4 George du Maurier ‘A choice of idioms’, Punch’s Almanack for 1888 (8 December 1887) (courtesy of HathiTrust) 93 2.5 El siglo futuro, 675 (31 January 1878) (Biblioteca Nacional de España)94

viii 2.6

2.7

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2.8

2.9

2.10

2.11

2.12

2.13

2.14

2.15 3.1

3.2

List of figures ‘Patín de ruedas perfeccionado, conjunto y detalles’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 131 (8 April 1876), 245 (courtesy of HathiTrust) 95 Dionisio Granado, Los patinadores: valses para piano (Madrid: Pablo Martín Editor, 1877). Music score. (Biblioteca Nacional de España) 97 Maximilien Graziani, Le skating: quadrille brillant pour piano par Maximilien Graziani (Paris: Alphonse Leduc Imp. Michelet, 1876). Music score. (Biblioteca Nacional de España) 98 Ramón Cilla, ‘Skating-Rink’, Madrid Cómico, 156 (13 February 1886), 4–5 (Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa Histórica. Creative Commons (CC) licence)  99 Jean Laurent, Skating Rink or Patinaje, altorrelieve en yeso (Skating, high relief in cast), 1878. High relief by Celestino García y Alonso. Photograph, negative (Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España, Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte)  101 ‘Revista Extranjera Ilustrada. Milán – Preparativos para la recepción del emperador de Alemania: Demolición del Rebecchino, en la plaza del Domo (por la noche)’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 40 (30 October 1875), 277 (courtesy of HathiTrust) 105 ‘Proyecto de Ensanche de la Calle de Sevilla: ingreso por la misma por la de Alcalá’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 44 (30 November 1878), 309 (courtesy of HathiTrust) 107 Hauser y Menet, Madrid, Edificio de La Equitativa, 1892. Photograph, collotype. 317 × 254 mm (Biblioteca Nacional de España)108 Godefroy Durand, ‘Aspecto de los bulevares de París el día de año nuevo antes de la guerra’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 1 (5 January 1871), 13 (courtesy of HathiTrust) 110 ‘El convento de calatravas’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 7 (20 March 1870), 84 (courtesy of HathiTrust) 113 Clockwise, Manuel Luque, ‘Las chismosas’ and Josep Lluís Pellicer, ‘Doble Sorpresa’, El Mundo Cómico, 16 (16 February 1873), 3–4 (Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa Histórica. Creative Commons (CC) licence) 138 Ramón Cilla, ‘Madrid chismoso. De regreso’, Madrid Chismoso, 18 (17 September 1885) (Biblioteca Regional de Madrid)139

3.3

3.4

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

3.5

3.6

3.7

4.1

4.2 4.3

4.4

4.5

4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9

List of figures ix Josep Lluís Pellicer, ‘Escenas matritenses. Una acera de la Puerta del Sol al anochecer’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 17 (8 May 1876), 304–5 (Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes) 147 ‘Nelson’s Column & Trafalgar Square London’, postcard sent in 1906. Collection Familia Osorio y Martos, Condes de la Corzana (Biblioteca Nacional de España) 149 Josep Lluís Pellicer, ‘En la Puerta del Sol. High-Liffe [sic]’, Madrid Cómico, 270 (21 April 1888), 4 (Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa Histórica. Creative Commons (CC) licence) 151 Mecachis (pseud. of Eduardo Sáenz Hermúa), ‘High Life’, La Caricatura, 7 (15 December 1884) (Biblioteca Nacional de España)152 Juan Llorens, Historia de un gallo social, ca. 1860–70. Broadside, wood engraving and letterpress. 43.8 × 32.1 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Max G. Wildnauer Fund) 154 ‘Los vendedores de Madrid’, Museo de las Familias, 6 (25 December 1848), 273, 276 (Biblioteca Nacional de España)167 Julio Gros, ‘Galería de tipos. El sabio de café’, Blanco y Negro, 127 (7 October 1893), 661 (courtesy of HathiTrust) 173 Ramón Cilla, ‘Tipos’, Madrid Cómico, 349 (26 October 1889), 5 (Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa Histórica. Creative Commons (CC) licence) 175 Ramón Cilla, ‘Nacionalidades’, Madrid Cómico, 163 (3 April 1886), 4–5 (Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa Histórica. Creative Commons (CC) licence) 177 Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla, Modista (dressmaker) in Colección de trajes de España, tanto antiguos como modernos que comprehende todos los de sus dominios, vol. 5 (Madrid: Casa de D.M. Copin Carrera de S. Gerónimo, 1777–83) (Biblioteca Nacional de España) 179 Josep Lluís Pellicer, ‘Las modistas’, El Mundo Cómico, 2 (10 November 1872), 4 (Biblioteca Nacional de España) 180 José Cuchy, ‘Galería de tipos. La modistilla’, Blanco y Negro, 122 (2 September 1893), 589–90 (courtesy of HathiTrust) 183 Almanaque festivo para el año de 1877 (Madrid: Murcia y Martí, 1876) (Biblioteca Nacional de España) 184 La modista felicita a ud. las pascuas de navidad (The dressmaker wishes you a happy Christmas), ca. 1900–20. Felicitaciones

x

4.10

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

4.11

4.12

4.13

4.14 4.15

4.16

4.17

4.18 5.1 5.2

5.3

5.4

List of figures de Navidad de oficios. Modistas. Cromolithography on paper (Biblioteca Nacional de España) Tomás Capuz, ‘Madrid. La esquina de la Calle de los Peligros’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 29 (15 December 1870), 464 (courtesy of HathiTrust) Luis José Sartorius, Plano de la antigua y nueva Puerta del Sol, con la planta y numeración de las casas a que afecta la reforma, ca. 1840–56. Map (Biblioteca Nacional de España) Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla, ‘Aguador de compra’, Colección de trajes de España, tanto antiguos como modernos que comprehende todos los de sus dominios, vol. 5 (Madrid: Casa de D.M. Copin Carrera de S. Gerónimo, 1777–83) (Biblioteca Nacional de España) Juan Carrafa, ‘Aguador’, Colección de trajes de España 1832 (Madrid: Calcografía Nacional, 1825) (Biblioteca Nacional de España)  CR (?), ‘Sketches in Madrid’, Illustrated London News (1 April 1876), 333 (© The British Library Board) Francisco Pradilla, ‘Madrid. En la fuente de Lavapiés’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 23 (16 June 1872), 360 (courtesy of HathiTrust) Josep Lluís Pellicer, ‘Los trenes de recreo’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 35 (22 September 1876), 180 (courtesy of HathiTrust) ‘El tren botijo’, postcard printed by Hauser y Menet, Madrid, and sent to St Leonards-on-Sea, England, in 1902 (collection of the author) ‘El tren botijo’, Blanco y Negro, 175 (8 September 1894), 576 (courtesy of HathiTrust) Mecachis, ‘¿En qué pensamos?’, Blanco y Negro, 97 (11 March 1893), 179 (courtesy of HathiTrust) Juan Comba, ‘Costumbres madrileñas. El último tranvía’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 1 (8 January 1891), 22 (courtesy of HathiTrust)  David Perea, ‘Costumbres madrileñas. Paseo de carruajes en la fuente de la Castellana en una tarde de primavera’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 11 (22 March 1876), 200–1 (courtesy of HathiTrust) Ramón Cilla, ‘Madrid’ (detail), Madrid Cómico, 287 (18 August 1888), 4–5 (Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa Histórica. Creative Commons (CC) licence)

185

189

191

193

193 195

196

198

199 200 218

219

220

226

5.5 5.6 5.7

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

5.8

5.9

5.10 5.11 5.12

5.13

List of figures xi Mecachis, ‘Chulerías’ (detail), Madrid Alegre, 8 (23 November 1889), 4–5 (Biblioteca Regional de Madrid) Ramón Cilla, ‘En el restaurant’, Madrid Alegre, 77 (16 November 1889), 5 (Biblioteca Regional de Madrid) Domingo Muñoz, ‘Los perdidos o los borrachos’, El Mundo Cómico, 158 (30 January 1876), 1 (Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa Histórica. Creative Commons (CC) licence) Josep Lluís Pellicer, ‘Apuntes de Madrid. ¡Pobre Madre!’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 3 (22 January 1877), 52 (courtesy of HathiTrust)  Domingo Muñoz [?] ‘Cróquis [sic], por un Inocente’, El Mundo Cómico, 9 (29 December 1872), 6 (Biblioteca Nacional de España) Mecachis, ‘Un artista precoz’, La Caricatura, 45 (2 September 1885) (Biblioteca Nacional de España) George W. Joy, The Bayswater Omnibus, 1895. Oil on canvas, 172 × 120 cm (© Museum of London) Narciso Méndez Bringa, ‘Tipos y costumbres de Madrid – En el tranvía’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 1 (8 January 1888), 28 (Biblioteca Nacional de España) ‘El tren botijo’, Blanco y Negro, 277 (22 August 1896) ­(courtesy of HathiTrust)

229 230

232

236

238 239 241

241 246

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the support of several institutions and individuals. Special thanks to Antonio Urquízar and Luis Sazatornil for their support over the years, and to a number of colleagues who offered their expertise throughout the research of this project: Alicia Cámara, Marie-Linda Ortega, Carlos Reyero, Andrew Ginger, Simon Lee, Margot Versteeg, Vicente Pla, Domingo Moreno de Carlos, Isabel Ortega, and Jessica Hinds-Bond. I am grateful to the Department of Art History and librarians at UNED, the Institute of Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, and the Art History Department at the University of Zurich. Thanks to my friends and colleagues at the Department of History at Florida International University, Alex Cornelius, Saad AbiHamad, and Erika Hartlitz-Kern for her always sound advice and tips on how to write. As I was struggling to finish this book, I asked Aurora Morcillo for recommendations to overcome the writer’s block that was keeping me from wrapping up the conclusion and putting an end to a project that had been part of my life for so long. She told me exactly what I needed to hear. I will miss her words of encouragement and her advice on how to work without forgetting how to live. I am also grateful to the staff at the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Biblioteca Regional de Madrid, Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa Histórica, Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España, Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, HathiTrust, and Museum of London for their efforts in swiftly finalising image permissions from their homes in the midst of the global pandemic that caught us all off guard. Work on this book was made possible by a grant from the Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte of Spain and the Association of Print Scholars, New York. Permission to reprint portions of the book was granted by Routledge and Cambridge Scholars. Portions of my book chapter ‘On and off the tram: Contemporary types and customs in Madrid’s illustrated and comical press (1874–1898)’ are reproduced with permission of Routledge through PLSclear. Excerpts from ‘A patchwork of effects: Notions of walking, sociability, and the flâneur in late



Acknowledgements xiii

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

nineteenth-century Madrid’ are published with permission of Cambridge Scholars. To my parents, thank you for your continuous encouragement. I thank my family, my brother and sister, and friends Jorge, Oliver (lo prometido es deuda), José Bellido, and Eloísa for her vitality. This book is for my forever patient husband Juan Pablo, who reviewed multiple versions of this ­manuscript, never grew tired, always made sure there was food in the fridge, and took care of our precious Lucas.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction: Decentring modernity

A heated discussion arose in Madrid’s main illustrated newspaper in 1871. The editor of La Ilustración Española y Americana published a somewhat acrimonious piece aimed at another well-known periodical of the time, New York’s Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.1 The Spanish editor openly disapproved of an illustration the other publication had printed earlier that month depicting Madrid’s main square, the Puerta del Sol. The image that created such fuss had intended to capture the anticipation surrounding the proclamation of the new progressive government. Instead, it portrayed the square and its people in an unsophisticated manner that failed to reflect the modern appearance of the renovated square, or the plural and conflicting political ideologies that truly existed, according to the magazine, among the city’s populace. The Spanish paper criticised the drawing’s lack of accuracy and censured graphic artists who ignored ‘la verdad histórica’ (the historical truth) and, instead, generally sketched ‘à bon plaisir’ (how they pleased). La Ilustración Española y Americana reprinted the ­illustration a few months later, and specified in the caption that the depiction of the Puerta del Sol and popular types in traditional attire was not executed by local artists but ‘según artistas extranjeros’ (according to foreign artists). The controversy might have been further ignited by the fact that the Puerta del Sol had undergone an important facelift just a decade earlier, the largest urban renovation project ever seen in the capital, which made the picture’s outmoded portrayal of the square all the more distressing. Almost a century and a half later, a similar debate emerged when Spain’s leading newspaper condemned the New York Times for publishing a piece that described Madrid as a provincial capital and evoked images of small children dressed in the same old-fashioned style as their parents.2 Once again, and in a completely different context, the thorny subject of modernity found its way onto the pages of the press. These episodes may seem anecdotal, but they highlight several key issues: our convoluted understanding of modern and local life, the tricky relationship between convenient stereotypes and what we perceive as truth, and the pace at which reproductions of images and

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2

Madrid on the move

texts from distant places could travel and alter the way societies viewed themselves, the world, and others. These are some of the themes that will be dealt with throughout this book. The history of any city is not straightforward; there are as many accounts of a city as there are ways of writing, experiencing, and representing it. Furthermore, any exploration of the life of industrialised cities demands a reckoning with the elusive yet unavoidable concept of modernity. Today, as in the nineteenth century, the meaning of modernity – as well as the meaning of culture, city, or art – is in continuous flux, evolving alongside our changing academic disciplines and understanding of the people and places that surround us. Enquiries into the significance of modernity respond to a desire to come to terms not only with the past but with the place we occupy in the world, in time, and in history. Responding to this undertaking, this book does not aim to reach a conclusion about modernity, but rather seeks to understand the motivations that prompted nineteenth-century citizens to reflect about what being modern meant in their daily lives. Madrid on the move began as a study of representations of modern life in Madrid’s illustrated press. While illustrations might at first glance seem to provide a complacent view of city life and popular social types engaging in daily activities, their representations of ‘modernity’ were variegated and complex, and these images were underpinned by deeply embedded concerns about the past and the future. An ongoing effort in the Spanish capital was made to determine what it meant to be modern, both on a local scale and in an increasingly interconnected world setting. The discussion that unfolded on the pages of La Ilustración Española y Americana points to the importance of this question for Madrid’s nineteenth-century inhabitants. Examining how nineteenth-century commentators and artists went about the slippery subject themselves gives insight into how change and continuity were negotiated through the popular medium of the press. They thought carefully about their mechanisms of representation and experimented with forms of visual and textual expression to help convey the unstable yet flexible meanings of concepts like innovation, internationalism, tradition, the past, privacy, and leisure. It is no coincidence that these debates emerged in the final decades of the nineteenth century, a crucial period in the development of printed media and visual communication in Madrid. During this time the uses of public space and the role of the public image as a vehicle of communication were tackled by legislators, academics, and urban planners, as well as by the lesser-known contributors to and graphic artists of the popular press. While certain themes and artistic styles are inexorably linked to specific national and local contexts, exploring how visual codes crossed over various media and national and cultural boundaries is key to any attempt to cast new light on Madrid’s modernising process.



Introduction 3

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

This book tells the story of modernity and visual culture in the Spanish capital during the nineteenth century. It charts how nineteenth-century journalists, commentators, and graphic artists articulated the relationship between the local and the global across Madrid’s visual cultures. The nineteenth century marked a crucial moment for cities across Europe and North America. Urbanisation, technological innovations, and the development of a mass culture yielded new forms of spectatorship and new ways of experiencing city life. Madrid underwent these processes just as many other European capitals did, and, as a result, the effects of urban and social change were at the heart of the growing number of circulating images and texts. Exploring debates surrounding new words and concepts puts the spotlight on how nineteenth-century citizens articulated meanings of the modern, what they deemed relevant and valuable, and how they expressed their concerns on both a visual and textual level. Across images and printed media – from illustrated magazines, caricatures, and postcards to journalistic writing, guidebooks, and maps – what surfaced was an acute awareness of the demands of modernisation and a feeling of forming part of (whether half-heartedly or with conviction) an increasingly entangled world. Cultural actors relied on words, visual language, and emotional statements to interrogate the interdependence between the past and the present and between the local and the global, two concepts and contexts that were being conceived and perceived as inseparable. In everyday life chroniclers, artists, and readers mediated change in multiple ways that moved beyond polarised positions and binary divides like those of new/old and foreign/local. Meanings of the modern were not only dictated by linguistic authorities and urban technocrats but were debated, lived, and constructed on a daily basis. On account of Spain’s peripheral location in Europe and in the historiography of modernity, readings of Madrid’s modernising process have posed a challenge to scholars across disciplines who continue to grapple with the overlapping of traditional and modern elements in the capital’s cultural production. Rather than positioning itself within restrictive divides or revisiting the hackneyed question of modernity, this book hopes to expose the ways in which cultural representations of modernisation were brought into conversation with earlier aesthetic conventions, ideas regarding the past, and processes occurring elsewhere in Europe in a productive and creative way. Therefore, emphasis is on concepts like interconnectedness, intercultural relations, and continuity, rather than on otherness, comparison, and difference. While this study deals with Madrid’s urban landscape and visual culture, it is not a comprehensive account of the capital’s urban or political history, its printing industry, or artistic genres like costumbrismo, nor does it intend to revisit the concept of modernity and evaluate how Spain fared in comparison to other countries. On the contrary, building on the work

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

4

Madrid on the move

of historians and visual and literary critics of Madrid, this book aims to strip the concept of modernity of the historiographic baggage that hinders productive thinking about cities that lie outside the canonical narrative of modernity and, ultimately, aims to dislocate the concept altogether. Reframing representations of local life in the increasingly interconnected context in which they were created opens the door to innovative readings of images that may at first seem to be anchored in nostalgia or expressions of nationalism. As the concept of modernity is decentred and diffused, readings of local, regional, and global experience become increasingly heterogenous yet integrated. To say that perceptions of public life and printed images became entangled in new ways across Western cities does not necessarily imply a process of homogenisation nor does it mean that Madrid’s modernity was merely emulating dominant Northern European cultures. Globalisation was uneven and accentuated the many differences that existed between nations and societies at the end of the nineteenth century.3 But at the same time, it heightened people’s awareness of their place on a stage that reached well beyond their city limits and changed the very structures of meaning they used to define newness and localness. This book engages with several themes including visual literacy, Madrid’s developing illustrated press industry, cross-national exchanges between editorial ventures, fashionable and international phrases and borrowings of words, social practices related to specific spaces like the Puerta del Sol, and the uses of satire, caricature, and stereotypes. While I do not give an extensive account of each of these themes, I hope to show how they were bound up in Madrid’s visual and print cultures, and to elucidate four key issues. First, the book explores the unstable nature of terminology and language used to define meanings of the modern and novelty. From the mid-1800s, writers and intellectuals in Spain acknowledged the importance of language in the construction of history and notions of contemporaneity and the modern self.4 Scholars of Spain note that self-reflexivity and attention to form were important aspects of Spanish literature and culture, suggesting that there was continuity rather than rupture between former aesthetic styles and those considered to be modernist or avant-garde.5 Self-reflection and awareness of form are key in understanding Spanish cultural production, but these patterns were not exclusive to Spain at this time. While we must exercise caution when speaking of globalisation in the nineteenth century, ‘self-conscious contemplations of globality’ and ‘connectivity talk’ emerged in public discourses in the latter half of the century and came to shape how globalisation would thereafter be steered.6 The debates that surfaced among Spanish academics, legislators, and urbanists as well as social commentators and artists were instances of ‘connectivity talk’, manifested in the acute awareness of language, visual motifs, and past histories and



Introduction 5

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

a­ esthetics. At a time when national identities were being shaped in Europe and the Americas and an interconnected economy and leisure market gained strength, the question of whether there was a middle ground between local and international interests was pervasive in public discourse. Therefore, definitions of the effects of migration as well as novelty and new practices in Madrid, such as roller skating or strolling like a flâneur, were articulated in relation to a broader world setting. A second thread this book explores is image-making in the late nineteenth century, as a visual lexicon developed that became just as powerful as words. This time was crucial in the history of the printed image and the press industry. Legislators, politicians, and cultural producers in Spain discussed the reach of the printed image, to what extent it should be regulated, and the instant in which it became part of the public sphere. In this sense, the reproduced image moved beyond its status as an artwork and became more relevant due to its role as a mechanically reproduced vehicle of communication. Public discussions and new legislation in Spain, which drew on current laws being (re)drafted in other parts of Europe and the United States, acknowledged the primacy of visual language as a form of communication as well as the uncertainty surrounding a format that showed signs of evolving at a fast pace, as evidenced by the move from early lithography to the latest techniques in photoengraving in the late 1880s. Over time, editors and artists became skilled in identifying what appealed to audiences’ eyes and what would, therefore, be profitable. Like other editorial ventures of the time, Madrid’s illustrated press exchanged images with their peer publications and reprinted images from European and North American papers. Art historians have considered the ‘contact zones’ between different cultures and how they have shaped our understandings of European art since the fifteenth century. While contact made differences apparent and reflected the interests of more powerful nations and social groups, it also allowed for hybrid practices, customs, and forms of expression.7 Due to the sharp rise of image-making during the second half of the nineteenth century, cultural contact did not only occur when two actors from different geographic locations crossed paths or carried out a commercial transaction. It also occurred in the mind of spectators who were exposed to images of and from different geographic locations, often reproduced on a single page or issue of a magazine. These non-physical contact zones further galvanised the creation of shared visual language that at once addressed foreign trends and examined aspects of Madrid’s public life. This practice, too, was fundamental in shaping meanings of the modern, the local, and interconnectedness in nineteenth-century Madrid. From this thread, a third theme emerges: an assessment of the overwhelming presence and persistence of the genre of costumbrismo in Madrid’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

6

Madrid on the move

popular print culture of the late nineteenth century. This artistic and literary style was rooted in romanticism and the interest in physiological types that spread across European illustrated publications from the early nineteenth century. Costumbrista writers and artists in Spain represented local types, daily customs, and scenes related to daily life. The persistent artistic style and seemingly outmoded stock figures and social types in Madrid’s illustrated print culture, and in the satirical press in particular, tend to be viewed as the final remnants of a conservative and outmoded genre that resisted modernist style and promoted nationalistic views. Moving beyond what Chiara de Cesari and Ann Rigney have termed methodological nationalism and building on literature that studies the synergic relationship between the popular and the modern in Spanish culture, I consider the intercultural and transnational nature of the style, its relationship with collective memory, and its role in easing the transition towards new forms of mass culture at the turn of the century.8 The visual–verbal dynamics of the illustrated press not only created a comical rapport between the artist and the audience but also drew attention to visual language itself and to the elusive relationship between reality and representation. New approaches to social types provided both the technological and conceptual grounds for mass popular culture of the turn of the century and would share similar traits with it. Like the costumbrista-inspired themes of illustrated print culture, it was easy to access, interpret, and relate to, and its themes had the potential to cross over to other visual media and forms of entertainment, such as musical plays, photographs, postcards, and cinema. Collections of character types and stock figures were not exclusive to Madrid, but were built on a visual and literary tradition going back to the late 1700s, one that became especially prevalent across Europe and the Americas during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when national identities were being reframed and national and imperial boundaries were shifting. Depictions of social types shared a similar visual nomenclature and format. Someone from Madrid would recognise the visual codes and cues in a British or Mexican depiction of, say, a street vendor or a water carrier (two widely represented social types) but would probably not be able to read the local idiosyncrasies of class, geographic location, or racial and social distinctions. This, too, is fundamental in understanding formulations of localness and the modern in nineteenth-century Madrid, and further debunks another myth of modernity, that it was absolutely homogenising. The content varied, but the guiding lines of the visual language were similar across national and cultural contexts. In this sense, it was more effective than any written language, as it had the ability to communicate across different borders. Finally, an overarching theme that binds this book together is the slipperiness of the concept of modernity. While acknowledging Walter



Introduction 7

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Benjamin and his canonical narrative of modernity (one based on new structures of visual experience that emerged in nineteenth-century Paris), this book follows literary and art scholars like Jo Labanyi and Lynda Nead who propose reframing the conditions of modernity and its visual and literary cultures in terms of continuity. And so, the book proposes a rethinking of the concept of the modern experience as a time of in-betweenness  – between geographic locations, aesthetic styles, and time frames – and it aims to decentre and diffuse the concept of the modern. In the words of one historian, the development of frameworks that move beyond nationalism allows us to ‘freshly appreciate the ways that the local, [the] regional, and the global are imbricated within one another’.9 Rather than gauging how Madrid’s visual culture and urbanisation fared compared to that of other cities, the book hopes to unearth the local and cross-cultural concerns at play. Eric Hobsbawm eloquently surmises that ‘words are witnesses which often speak louder than documents’.10 Modernity is one such word, its significance and meanings continuing to be debated in everyday life and across academic disciplines. Terms related to newness, foreign influence, and interconnectedness ignited heated discussions in the nineteenth century, as they do today. Since words like modernity and modernisation were not common in the Spanish language during the second half of the nineteenth century, I have avoided using them in the title of this book. This was a time when the unstable meanings of these words and other neologisms were debated across Madrid’s visual and print cultures. The subject of modernisation pushes us to interrogate the labels we use to talk about people, places, and processes. Scholars like Nigel Thrift argue that modernity is a dangerous concept due to its restrictive nature and its inadequacy to explain concepts like globalisation, homogenisation, and inauthenticity. Furthermore, histories of urban modernity credit new modes of perceiving time, space, and the flow of ideas to nineteenth-century industrialisation, although such shifts can be traced back to antiquity.11 Indeed – and as much of this book will show – nineteenth-century accounts described responses to newness as something that had more to do with human behaviour and preexisting practices than with mechanisation and advances exclusive to the period. However, and despite controversies about the validity of ‘modernity’ as a narrative, we must investigate it as a concept, especially in light of the overriding concern with modernisation, the homogenising effects of urbanisation, and the acute awareness of foreign influence that surfaced across Madrid’s cultural production of the late nineteenth century. What does merit more attention, nonetheless, is the way in which writers and artists went about describing such processes in their time and the mechanisms they used to construct meaning. Instances of interconnectedness, urban change, and memories

8

Madrid on the move

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

of a historical past were all woven into visual and textual representations of Madrid’s present. Reformulating modernity also means enquiring into how audiences tried to define change and find middle ground between the novelty and the past, between the local and the foreign, concepts that were not always perceived in a polarised manner. This middle ground debunks another of modernity’s main fallacies – that modernity implies an all-ornothing approach.12 In nineteenth-century Madrid, novelty and change were presented as a plethora of in-betweens.

Modernity, again? The narrative of modernity as one bound up with industrialisation offers a useful framework to explain the visual experience in the nineteenth century, the dramatic growth of image-making, and the emergence of new models of dominant and contested visual cultures.13 Industrialisation brought about a profound structural transformation in how society, politics, and economic production were organised, and, at the same time, altered human experience at a more fundamental level, changing how people conducted their daily activities, from their purchase and consumption of goods to the ways in which they moved throughout the city or sought out entertainment. The incorporation of Spain into an investigation of modernity, already an elusive concept, presents an additional set of challenges due to the country’s late industrialisation and position on the periphery of Europe and, until recently, on the fringes of European cultural studies. For decades, Spain’s modernisation was viewed as failed, and histories of Spanish modernisation were dominated by terms like anomaly, failure, and difference.14 The shift away from these narratives of failure introduced by scholars such as Juan Pablo Fusi, Jordi Palafox, David Ringrose, and Isabel Burdiel in the 1990s opened new paths of enquiry in the study of nineteenth-century culture. Negative accounts were reinforced by comparing Spain to other nations, a competition in which Spain fared poorly. While Spain’s industrialisation was weaker and delayed in comparison to other European countries, and the country’s political stability in the late nineteenth century owed much to a rigged system, scholars have concurred that Spain shared basic yet vital features with its European neighbours.15 It exhibited novel and more inclusive forms of leisure and entertainment, an organised governmental administration, a burgeoning press industry, profound changes in its social structure, and a growing market that favoured and fostered such advances.16 What this shift in viewpoint essentially challenged was a negative narrative that had dominated the literature of Spanish modernity since the turn of the twentieth century, and that was so grippingly articulated by the Generation



Introduction 9

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

of 1898.17 This change in viewpoint opened the door to a new reasoning that finally unpacked what Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi describe as ‘the false opposition of modernity and tradition’.18 Overall, studies that moved beyond myths of failure introduced four paradigm shifts on which this book draws: normalcy replaced exception; stability and continuity weakened terms like rupture or stagnation; contextualisation supplanted comparison; and the binary divides that had contributed to reinforcing these concepts – tradition vs. modernity – were, to a degree, interrogated. As noted by Susan Larson, a number of qualifying (or problematic) adjectives have been associated with Spain’s modernity, including recalcitrant, marginal, multiple, divergent, and peripheral, to which we can add anxious, defensive, contradictory, uneven, or uneasy.19 While such adjectives continue to appear in conjunction with readings of Spanish modernisation, what these works ultimately respond to is the goal of resolving Spain’s absence from the canonical narrative of modernity and proposing other ways of being modern. This book acknowledges especially the work of cultural, literary, and urban historians of Madrid like Deborah Parsons, Edward Baker, Susan Larson, Luis Enrique Otero Carvajal, and literary critics examining the construction of culture and modern identities in Spain, in particular Noël Valis, Jo Labanyi, and Andrew Ginger.20 The frameworks they propose do not merely oppose notions of tradition to novelty, or simply situate Madrid within European narratives of modernity. Instead, they suggest alternate frameworks of modernity that emphasise self-­ awareness and the coexistence of tradition and modernity, of the past and the present. This perspective allows us to analyse how aesthetic practices that were seemingly conservative or backward contained far more complex elements that engaged with issues related to modernisation. This book draws on these studies, reframing modernisation in terms of continuity and hybridity, but steps away from adjectives like uneasy or resistant by examining the ways in which visual and public narratives articulated perceptions of newness in relation to broader European processes, fashions, and trends. This study, therefore, opens two main paths of enquiry: it explores the discursive practices by which meanings of the modern were created, and it decentres modernity from its traditional geographic centres. Rather than focusing on the outcomes of urbanisation, this study focuses on the visual, emotional, and verbal expressions that resulted from interrogating how meanings of the modern were created. In short, it attempts to expose n ­ ineteenth-century systems of representation and demonstrates that modernisation was defined in relation to both local and global contexts, which, rather than simply coexisting or being opposed to one another, were interlocked and mutually dependent.21 As for the second path of enquiry, decentring the concept of modernity means both

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

10

Madrid on the move

acknowledging the c­ anonical texts of the history of modernity, and, at the same time, dissociating innovative models of experience from these specific places. Decentring and normalising the concept also means rethinking experiences of the modern as an awareness of change, or of stagnation, and not as an abrupt break from the past. Debates surrounding the modern can be viewed, therefore, as a platform and site of confluence that allowed audiences and cultural producers to discuss the past and the present, instances of interconnectedness, and change at a local level. Much of the history of modernity as one bound to the city of Paris and to experience of the new is grounded in the work of Walter Benjamin, who framed modernity as a break with the past and a shock of the ever new, a process that crystallised in the nineteenth century with the consolidation of urban renewal projects and public spectatorship. Benjamin explored the experience of modernity as a radical discontinuity probed by the fleeting and transitory qualities Charles Baudelaire associated with modern life during the second half of the century.22 This idea found further impetus in the work of Georg Simmel, who posited that the multiplicity of stimuli in the modern city pushed individuals to find new attitudes through which to register the shocks of urban life triggered by industrialisation and capitalism.23 The weight given to acceleration has led to a commonplace notion that nineteenth- and twentieth-century experience was marked by rupture, a notion that has been furthered by postmodern theories.24 Moving away from the concept of the shock of the new is crucial in reformulating modernisation in a fluid manner. As Andrew Ginger eloquently notes, modernity did not happen only in Paris or London. It occurred everywhere.25 That said, moving away from Francocentric accounts of modernity does not mean overlooking, for example, Paris’s unrivalled presence in ­nineteenth-century culture, a presence that many nineteenth-century academics, journalists, and urbanists themselves acknowledged.26 When expressions like break and rupture are reframed as negotiation, which is closer to how audiences and public discourse broached issues like social and urban change or foreign influence, references to the past and the persistence of preexisting aesthetic styles can be reframed. One might be tempted to jettison the concept of modernity. However, the overwhelming presence of discussions surrounding the effects of urbanisation and the interdependencies of national trends in nineteenth-century sources indicates that the concept still merits consideration. The task ahead may involve dismantling the concept of modernity, repositioning it, or even dissolving its centrality in order to rethink how it played out on a global scale at a time when differences between nations were being weighed and negotiated. The grand narrative of a single, monolithic modernity expanding from Paris to other locations has given way to the analysis of case studies, or



Introduction 11

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

­ odernities. Studies have posited the possibility of provincial, folkloric, m peripheral, or global modernities, thus reinstating local identities and nondominant urban centres within accounts of modernisation.27 Other lines of enquiry have pushed for a fluid understanding of modernity, not only in terms of its geographical location but also in terms of preexisting notions of the world and the so-called disruptive forms of experience prompted by technological innovation. Scholars like Lynda Nead have stepped away from the idea of modernity as rupture. Her study of Victorian London and visual culture explains the persistence of elements of the picturesque, arguing that the reasonably familiar aesthetic conventions of the picturesque were reworked to represent a changing urban landscape. Picturesque props no longer represented rural continuity but rather represented the ‘forces of change’. While it is true that the picturesque struggled to capture the full effects of transformation, it also played a role in ‘drawing attention to the very processes producing it’.28 This approach allows new frameworks for the study of conventional archetypes and brings into light the cross-cultural connections that existed between European urban cultures and emotional and visual responses to urbanisation. While certain aesthetic practices and depictions of local customs and stock figures may appear to simply be rehashing old conventions, the fact that they persisted as a form of entertainment in various areas of popular culture well into the twentieth century suggests that their meanings were far more convoluted than thought. I analyse such practices not separately in an uneasy and tense coexistence but rather as a single, integrated process. Readings that emphasise self-reflection and continuity allow us to build on the idea of experience of newness as reflection rather than as rupture, and to focus on the experience itself. This shift opens the possibility of reframing seemingly pervasive inconsistencies that surface throughout nineteenth-century cultural production: references to a bygone past, the nostalgic narrative of the present, and visual and literary tropes dating back to the depiction of customs or, in the case of Spain, costumbrismo. These readings have been conducted from the vantage point of a notion of continuity and attempt to bridge the gap between the past and present, rather than building on the traumatic semantics of crisis and resistance. If the historiography of Madrid’s modernity has been a history of moving from a narrative of failure to one of overcoming divides and finally studying the coexistence and tensions between Spanish and cosmopolitan dynamics, new perspectives are being invigorated by the so-called global turn. The historiography of Spanish modernity has, to some degree, moved in parallel with the development of global understandings of urban processes. The field of global studies has pushed urban historians and scholars across disciplines to unearth the global scaffolding of processes that were previously studied from national, regional, or local perspectives.29 Each generation attempts to

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

12

Madrid on the move

look at the past through a new window. Like the generation that witnessed Spain’s imperial decline in 1898 or the historians who experienced the country’s newfound prosperity in the 1990s, the window through which we currently look at the past cannot help but be transformed by current discussions on globalisation. While the term global seems to be on the tip of our tongues these days, contact between different cultures has shaped art for centuries, and historians have long engaged with the question of how these flows functioned. A global perspective does not merely entail adopting a comparative analysis or studying a subject of universal history. It means exploring phenomena that transcend societies’ customary boundaries.30 National boundaries, after all, do not always explain how societies develop, how they become connected, or why certain features became concerning or compelling to their citizens. Throughout this study I will use the term global following Vanessa Ogle’s understanding of nineteenth-century globalisation in ‘its broadest sense’, that is, as the process of building sustained ‘interconnections, exchanges, and dependencies between world regions and states’ on a political, economic, social, and cultural level.31 This book looks at a specific moment in the history of Madrid and the development of both a local and extra-local awareness expressed through the city’s visual cultures and popular culture narratives. Improvements in the printing industry during the second half of the nineteenth century changed how ideas were communicated and experienced, and had a profound effect on the ways in which citizens perceived the historical moment and their local identities in relation to their place in the world. That said, the ascent of a global awareness did not exclude the strengthening of national discourses of identity.32 These transcultural relations made Madrileños (residents of Madrid) more versed in and aware of the intricacies and workings of their own local culture. Recent scholarship attempts to move beyond methodologies of nationalism. The aim of this approach is to develop new methods and tools that allow us to study memory and tradition from our current ‘“post-national” awareness of the contingency of nationalism’ due to the limited resources it offers in terms of lived experience, daily life, and worldwide systems.33 Dislocating and decentring are just some of the verbs used to describe the academic endeavour of revisiting urban modernity from a perspective that considers the transnational, regional, and local dynamics of cities and overcomes the idea that peripheral or second-rate cities simply imitate more powerful ones.34 As early as the nineteenth century, modernity had begun to be understood as a concept rather than as an event bound to a specific time and place.35 Diverse societies were drawn together in networks of ‘interaction, interdependence, domination, and coexistence’. This ­ development



Introduction 13

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

fostered what Victor Roudometof has called ‘glocal modernities’, in which the historical trajectories of different modernities ultimately influence one another.36 While glocal modernity may seem to be yet another methodological twist, this notion does bring about a change in perspective. Reading cities through this lens involves not just an exercise of comparing and contrasting but one of understanding how people understood their relation with local places and foreign spaces in a simultaneous and correlational manner. From this perspective, we can see that whether one country was on the ‘periphery’ is not important. After all, during this period only a handful of Madrileños had travelled to Paris, New York, or Buenos Aires to see first-hand the novel inventions and fashions that reached their city. Yet a burgeoning press and publishing industry brought these places and experiences to them, allowing spectators and readers to engage with multiple nations and places without leaving the Spanish capital.37 As a result, perceptions of both local and extra-local practices were constantly rethought and reshaped. From strolling in Madrid’s new urbanised spaces to attending a traditional religious festivity – all was touched by a way of seeing the world that acknowledged both local and foreign influences. The term glocal brings together two concepts that have a long history of coexisting. This term originally appeared in the late twentieth century in the field of economics to explain novel marketing strategies. As noted by Joachim Blatter, glocalisation is indicative of both the ‘universalizing and particularizing tendencies’ in contemporary social systems. This hybrid term adds even more to the notion of transcultural networks, as it signals that global and local processes occur simultaneously and are connected on different levels. Because this theory implies that spaces and identities are shaped by both local and foreign forces, therefore, globalisation does not necessarily entail the homogenisation and centralisation of culture.38 While glocalisation was coined to address the twentieth century’s socioeconomic and political landscape, indications of this process can be traced back centuries, albeit not with the pace of today’s contemporary world. In nineteenth-century Madrid, Anglicisms, Gallicisms, and neologisms like modernisation were used in an attempt to better define the sociocultural and visual landscape. Words like mestizo or the Latin form hybridus to refer to an offspring of mixed race were used in Spain and even introduced to Italian and French as early as the seventeenth century.39 In fact, as noted  by Roudometof, cultural critics have adopted these terms as a shorthand to address intercultural relations across nations.40 The historical e­ xistence of terms like mestizaje or hybridity shows that glocality – and related processes  – have long formed part of the way societies operate and the mechanisms people use to formulate ideas of exchange, interaction, and transformation.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

14

Madrid on the move

In nineteenth-century Madrid, the formation of a global awareness did not progress in a straight line. It was a messy process, laden with comings and goings, with intersections and convoluted webs where notions of the past and present, the local and extra-local, were continuously negotiated and redefined. It involved resisting foreign forces, as well as reconciling extremes, consciously adopting or neglecting international fashion, and unconsciously creating hybrid practices. While regional identities were sometimes referenced, Madrid was both self-centred and outward looking (a feature, one could argue, of many European capitals in the nineteenth century). What is noteworthy about Madrid’s visual culture was the degree to which it was self-referential and historically self-conscious. In this sense, this book does not establish the existence of a cosmopolitan identity vs. a national one, or a local sense of self vs. multiple regional identities. Neither does it aim to draw parallels between popular print cultures, artworks, or urbanisation projects across Europe or within Spain. Instead, it looks at the window through which citizens peered out at a changing world. In the nineteenth century the essential task of creating meaning (of modernisation, culture, the self, and the other) depended on both local and foreign phenomena. I am interested in getting at the essence of these processes, the construction of these meanings, as this investigation reveals how people perceived themselves through a lens that also considered other cultures, peoples, and locations.

Visual methodologies and urban spectatorship Images are potent carriers of meaning, and illustrations reproduced in books, postcards, posters, and the press are fundamental in understanding perceptions of urban life and visual practices in the nineteenth century. This period was fundamentally transformative for image-making and the emerging mass culture due to advances in mechanisation and printing technologies. Printed media as well as other forms of popular culture geared towards the growing urban middle classes provide insight into the daily life of people in a way that high art, with its limited audience, cannot. As underlined by Jason E. Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz, the nineteenth-century news image is linked to the modern experience because it embodies two of modernity’s defining characteristics: the dissemination of information and mechanical reproduction.41 In the recent and long-needed study on the development of illustrated print media in France, Patricia Mainardi has underscored that there is little scholarship on the visual language of illustrated print culture at a time when technological exchanges enabled the development of printed media across the West. These kinds of images are of great value for the field



Introduction 15

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

of visual studies, as they shed light on our understanding of modernism and the juncture at which high art was challenged by an incipient popular culture.42 In this regard, in addition to exploring Madrid’s modernisation, this book hopes to add to current scholarship of nineteenth-century printmaking and visual practices and the ambitious endeavour of unearthing the links that existed between different editorial projects. This book concentrates on images of Madrid and its city life reproduced in the capital’s illustrated and comical press from the 1860s to the mid1890s, images that were primarily geared towards middle-class audiences. It also draws from a number of other printed and visual sources, including guidebooks, novels, maps, urban treatises, sessions of congress, costumbrista collections, postcards, and other printed ephemera. Its timeline spans part of the Sexenio Democrático (1868–74) and the early decades of the Restoration, which commenced in 1875. The Restoration inaugurated a period of stability in the daily life of the capital, albeit through a fragile political system. However, it was during these decades that the city expanded and its press and printing industry thrived. While the book’s focus is mainly on the cultural production of this period, it also considers the preceding visual culture which late nineteenth-century images built on. In analysing images, this book applies an interdisciplinary approach, combining the methodologies of cultural, urban, and visual studies, and it is informed by spatial, gender, and literary theory. It owes to the pioneering work of Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Marie-Linda Ortega, Bernardo Riego, and Vicente Pla Vivas, who have applied the methods of cultural and visual studies to the Spanish context.43 Like other interdisciplinary fields, the field of visual culture, as well as its parameters and objects of study, continues to evolve. Illustrations are not merely representations or instruments of a larger political or ideological project; they are texts through which tensions, interruptions, and connections manifest themselves. While literary and cultural critics convincingly use images as cultural texts, we cannot overlook debates about style and other matters that have traditionally received more attention in the discipline of art history. The history of art has long dealt with issues pertaining to the aesthetic experience versus reality and to the transmission of knowledge through visual representation. These matters surfaced in popular print and visual culture as this media was at the ­crossroads of art and communication. Images that circulated within the Spanish capital played a part within broader systems of knowledge and representation during the period. In addition to containing information on a specific event, they featured a number of artistic motifs that tapped into the readership’s memory and emotions and ultimately made these publications more appealing and understandable to a larger audience. Although affective aspects obviously

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

16

Madrid on the move

inform how images are perceived, cultural conditions also play a part in enabling illustrations reproduced in the press to communicate with a heterogeneous readership and at the same time engross them at an emotional level.44 Images allowed unofficial ideas and associations about Madrid’s modernising process to seep through in a way that literature and the written word could not. Because urban citizens were informed by a range of printed media, we must not compartmentalise these materials but instead understand how the processes of seeing and reading became bound up with one another.45 Bernardo Riego coined the term ‘spectator-reader’ to refer to this type of urban, middle-class citizen who had access to a range of printed and visual media, from optical illusions and forms of leisure like panoramas to books, periodicals, and an array of printed ephemera such as labels or broadsheets.46 In fact, the themes covered in the illustrated and popular press crossed over to other visual media and forms of entertainment. The writers of a popular musical and theatrical genre called género chico, for instance, also contributed to the comical press, while artists working for periodicals like Blanco y Negro reached a wider audience thanks to the flourishing postcard industry.47 These exchanges attest to the fluidity that existed between the different fields of cultural production and visual media that were all working together within the same inter-ocular field.48 Rather than having a compartmentalised understanding of leisure and visual culture, spectators were familiar with the shared topics and techniques that operated across different visual formats. The creation of culture is after all a two-way street in which consumers and producers relied on one another to create a relevant message and a readable language of visual prompts and cues. Readers tend to be thought of as impressionable consumers of information; however, they were more ‘sharp eyed’ than is usually considered.49 Cultural representations need to be approached as a space in which tensions between power, production, and reception intersected, all the more so in the case of mechanically produced print culture due to its reliance on immediacy and its appeal to a broad audience. An entertainment industry that is market-driven cannot unequivocally control its output or determine how consumers will react in the political, economic, and social realms.50 Furthermore, as Madrid’s press industry became more established, journalists were finally able to make a living thanks to their writing.51 At the same time, graphic artists gradually stepped away from academic art, especially in the final decades of the century.52 As a result, the press, and especially satirical magazines, served as a platform for experimentation for aspiring draftsmen trying to make their way in this growing, competitive industry.53 The second half of the nineteenth century was a defining moment for the establishment of a solid leisure industry and popular culture in Spain. Because journalism was, to a degree,



Introduction 17

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

considered a form of low culture, academics struggled to define the role of this increasingly popular outlet in society and the status that journalists should have compared to writers. The nineteenth century was witness to an ongoing dispute between, on the one hand, recognised academics and institutions like the Real Academia Española and, on the other, journalists and artists who contributed to the popular press.54 Authors and members of the Real Academia like Juan Valera and Eugenio Sellés recognised that despite periodicals’ reliance on little-known and even anonymous authors, the publications had an enormous reach and impact during their first twenty-four hours of circulation, due to their low cost and accessibility.55 These academics had to reconcile their qualms about the coexistence of art with efficiency and ephemerality – a debate that is not all that far from our present-day concerns over social media and news outlets. Nineteenth-century cultural producers and audiences had to acknowledge that, although quality seemed to be compromised, the reach of mass-produced products required different parameters of assessment altogether. As much of this book will explore, Madrid’s visual culture was defined not just by ideologies or political events but by the new mechanisms and language of mass production, and it was further shaken by the awareness that Madrid formed part of a cultural and visual context that reached beyond the country’s borders. This book is divided into five chapters that move from a survey of Madrid’s visual culture and landscape to an enquiry into specifics of modernisation and popular culture. Chapter 1 sets the stage by providing an overview of Madrid’s urban and visual landscape during the nineteenth century, including its printed media and novel forms of visual entertainment. It discusses the connections between seeing, experiencing, and representing the modern city and analyses the illustrated press in Madrid as well as other urban centres. Editorial ventures across Europe shared similar objectives. They drew attention to the visual formulae that appealed to audiences, the implications of the mechanical reproduction of images and their ability to reach foreign audiences, and the problematic relationship between representation and the elusive notion of truth. Urban views of Madrid, maps, and engravings reproduced in guidebooks and travel literature attempted to depict the city as a dynamic site in continuous flux. This objective not only served representational purposes but was also a way of capturing audiences’ attention. Chapter 2 concentrates on what being modern meant to nineteenthcentury citizens and the way in which they viewed Madrid as part of an increasingly interconnected setting. With the aim of unpacking the problematic concept of modernity as a phenomenon focalised on Paris and London, this chapter discusses debates that emerged among graphic artists,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

18

Madrid on the move

journalists, and urban chroniclers about terms like modernisation. The chapter explores new practices like roller skating as well as experiences like demolition and urban renovation at a time when illustrators experimented with innovative layouts to conceptualise modernisation and related ideas in visual terms. Madrileños were attentive to the ways in which international flows of ideas and fashion played out and influenced the city’s relation to the past and the future. Because the world was beginning to be perceived as a more interconnected stage, the importance of place in the formulations of modernity is undermined. Chapter 3 then focuses on specific locations in Madrid, like the Puerta del Sol, and the role that sociability (a feature typically associated with Spanish cities) played in visual culture. It discusses the aloof and introspective figure of the flâneur, the Parisian archetype par excellence and a somewhat contentious symbol of cultural modernity. Expressions like flâneur or high life were broached by social and visual chroniclers in Spain who questioned the difference between flânerie and social routines like the leisurely strolls that were long established in Madrid. Illustrations and caricatures drew connections between preexisting local practices and fashionable, foreign behaviours. Accounts of flânerie à deux demonstrate that convivial e­ ncounters were not incompatible with attentive and introspective observation. On the contrary, social life was tied into these visual and literary accounts of the urban experience. What emerged in descriptions of sites like Madrid’s Puerta del Sol was a perception of urban life where private and public space, memory and lived experience, and the local and the cosmopolitan were rolled into one. The chapter calls into question the idea that urban renewal was perceived as a drastic rupture with the past. If local sentiments and archetypes like the flâneur are offset in this way, archetypes and customs must also be reassessed from a vantage point that positions them in relation to broader interconnected settings. The final two chapters focus on representations of social types and customs that appeared in satirical magazines, postcards, and photographs as well as in short stories, newspaper articles, and musical pieces, and they rethink these representations from a transnational and intercultural framework. Chapter 4 revisits concepts like memory and nostalgia and provides a reading of these images that moves beyond the assumption that they were an outmoded aesthetic rooted in the picturesque. They were in fact deeply bound up with changing ideas about urbanisation, gender, and class relations, and they addressed concerns about the expansion of mass entertainment and low culture. Conventional social types like the street vendor and the seamstress were reworked to express contemporary concerns through the well-known genre of costumbrismo. These types tapped into the visual memory of readers, who drew connections between familiar



Introduction 19

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

aesthetic conventions and present-day concerns in innovative ways. The chapter then focuses on two sites, the city fountain and the tren botijo, a third-class excursion train. The tension between the past and the present dissipates in these illustrations, which no longer relied on a ‘then/now’ narrative but instead put the spotlight on the visual lexicon being used. What surfaced in these representations was not an uncomfortable coexistence but rather a dialogue between a number of dualisms, the old and new, the foreign and local, and motifs rooted in costumbrismo and modern media like photography and inventive typesetting. This chapter also considers the international visual language of costumbrismo, which varied from setting to setting but had the potential to communicate on local issues in a consistent visual lexicon. Chapter 5 studies how the illustrated and satirical press eased this transition between engraving and photography in the press, a phenomenon that once again calls into question the narrative of modernity (and its associated media) as a break or a rupture. Rather than tracing a line from the illustration and sketch to modernism and subsequent avant-garde styles, this chapter situates illustrations in relation to photojournalism. The visual–verbal dynamics and the interplay between text and image were fundamental in creating a comical rapport with spectators that enhanced their understanding of the picture in diverse ways. In this interplay the readership’s complicity and understanding of the codes being used (or circumvented) was crucial. Plays of words and images, turns of phrase, and reflections on sketches drawn del natural (from nature) brought the issue of form, representation, and the growing presence of photography to the fore. The editorial ventures of the 1890s brought together a variety of media in inventive layouts. This convergence resulted in the coexistence of all three media – illustration, caricature, and photography – not only in one single issue but on one single page, thus enabling viewers to experience all three forms of expression in just one glance.

Notes

 1 ‘La verdad en su lugar’, La Ilustración Española y Americana (IEA), 25 (5 September 1871), 431. The new ministerial president was Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla of the Partido Demócrata-Radical. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.   2 Susana Hidalgo, ‘¿Es Madrid provinciana?’ El País, 3 March 2007. Accessed 15 January 2017. http://elpais.com/diario/2007/02/03/madrid/1170505466_850 215.html. The article refers to Sarah Wildman, ‘36 hours in Madrid’, New York Times, 28 January 2007. Accessed 15 January 2017. http://travel.nytimes. com/2007/01/28/travel/28hours.html.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

20

Madrid on the move

  3 Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).  4 Andrew Ginger, Liberalismo y romanticismo. La reconstrucción del sujeto histórico (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2012), 217–19.   5 Jo Labanyi makes this argument in relation to the Spanish realist novel. See Labanyi, Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel (Oxford: Oxford Hispanic Studies, 2000), esp. 94, 385, 388.  6 Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 4, 6. Ogle argues that ‘connectivity talk’ was ultimately an ideological formation that intended to impose a predominantly European and North American image of the world (204).   7 Mary D. Sheriff, introduction to Sheriff (ed.), Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art, 1492–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 2–3.   8 Chiara de Cesari and Ann Rigney, introduction to Chiara de Cesari and Ann Rigney (eds.), Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales (Utrecht: De Gruyter, 2014), 1–25.   9 Felicity A. Nussbaum, introduction to Nussbaum (ed.), The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 10. 10 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London: Random House, 1962), 1. 11 Nigel Thrift, ‘“Not a straight line but a curve”, or Cities are not mirrors of modernity’, in David Bell and Azzedine Haddour (eds.), City Visions (Harlow: Longman, 2000), esp. 233–8. For a discussion of the category of modernity and its relation to colonialism and Western hegemony, see Nussbaum, introduction, esp. 4–8. 12 Thrift, ‘Not a straight line’, 234. Thrift draws here on Michel Serres, Genesis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), and Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 13 Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, ‘Visual culture’s history: Twenty-first century interdisciplinarity and its nineteenth-century objects’, in Schwartz and Przyblyski (eds.), The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 8–9. 14 For an overview of the negative assessments of the nineteenth century, see Santos Juliá, ‘Anomalía, dolor y fracaso de España’, Claves de Razón Práctica, 66 (October 1996), 10–21; and Manuel Suárez Cortina, ‘La Restauración ­(1875–1900) y el fin del imperio colonial. Un balance historiográfico’, in Manuel Suárez Cortina (ed.), La Restauración, entre el liberalismo y la democracia (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1997), esp. 34. 15 Adrian Shubert and José Alvarez Junco, Introduction to Shubert and Álvarez Junco (eds.), The History of Modern Spain: Chronologies, Themes, Individuals (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 1, 4. Also see, David Ringrose, Spain, Europe, and the ‘Spanish Miracle’, 1700–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a discussion of the paradigm of failure, see Isabel Burdiel, ‘Myths of failure, myths of success: New perspectives on



Introduction 21

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

nineteenth-century Spanish liberalism’, Journal of Modern History, 70:4 ­ (December 1998), 892–912; and Mónica Burguera, ‘Introducción. El atraso y sus descontentos: entre el cambio social y el giro cultural’, in Burguera and Christopher Schmidt-Novara (eds.), Historias de España contemporánea: Cambio social y giro cultural (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2008), 9–16. With regard to the causes that hindered a more productive analysis of the nineteenth century, Spanish historians also point to the academic isolation and positivist methodology of the Francoist period, as well as to the political agendas that permeated research. On this subject, see Suárez Cortina, ‘La Restauración (1875–1900) y el fin del imperio colonial’, esp. 34; and Miguel Ángel Cabrera, ‘Developments in contemporary Spanish historiography: From social history to the new cultural history’, Journal of Modern History, 77 (2005), esp. 999–1001. 16 Juan Pablo Fusi and Jordi Palafox, España 1808–1996. El desafío de la modernidad (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1997), 11–12; Juliá, ‘Anomalía’, 10–21. 17 An intellectual debate known as ‘el problema de España’ arose at the turn of the century in relation to Spanish identity and nationhood following the country’s imperial decline. It is termed under different names including ‘el ser de España’ (the being of Spain) and ‘las dos Españas’ (the two Spains), amongst others. The literature on this subject is extensive, and the following works are not exhaustive but provide an overview: Eloy Benito Ruano, ‘En principio fue el nombre’, in Benito Ruano (ed.), España: Reflexiones sobre el ser de España (Madrid: Real Academia de Historia, 1997), 13–28, and Santos Juliá, Historia de las dos Españas (Madrid: Taurus, 2004). 18 Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, ‘Culture and modernity: The case of Spain’, in Graham and Labanyi (eds.), Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 11. 19 Susan Larson, Constructing and Resisting Modernity: Madrid 1900–1936 (Madrid: La Casa de la Riqueza, 2011), 20. These terms correspond respectively to the work of: Luisa E. Delgado, Jordana Mendelson, and Oscar Vázquez, ‘Recalcitrant modernities: Spain, cultural difference and the location of modernism’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 13:2–3 (August/December 2007), 105–19; Shmuel Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities (New York: Brill Academic, 2003); Anthony L. Geist and José B. Monleón, introduction to Geist and Monleón (eds.), Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America (New York: Garland, 1999). The adjectives anxious, defensive, and contradictory are discussed in Jesús Torrecilla, El tiempo y los márgenes: Europa como utopía y como amenaza en la literatura española (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), esp. 51, 107; uneven in Stephanie Sieburth, Inventing High and Low: Literature, Mass Culture, and Uneven Modernity in Spain (Durham, NC: Duke Unviersity Press, 1994); and uneasy in Noël Valis, The Culture of Cursilería: Bad Taste, Kitsch and Middle Class in Modern Spain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 20 See Valis, The Culture of Cursilería; Deborah Parsons, ‘Fiesta culture in Madrid posters, 1934–1955’, in Jo Labanyi (ed.), Constructing Identity in

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

22

Madrid on the move

­Twentieth-Century Spain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 178–205; Parsons, A Cultural History of Madrid: Modernism and the Urban Spectacle (Madrid: Berg, 2003); Susan Larson, ‘Stages of modernity: The uneasy symbiosis of the género chico and early cinema in Madrid’, in Larson and Eva Woods (eds.), Visualizing Spanish Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 263–82; Edward Baker, Madrid Cosmopolita: La Gran Vía, 1910–1936 (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2009); Luis Enrique Otero Carvajal and Rubén Pallol Trigueros, ‘Tradición y modernidad en la España urbana de la Restauración’, in Guadalupe GómezFerrer Morant and Raquel Sánchez García (eds.), Modernizar España: Proyectos de reforma y apertura internacional (1898–1914) (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2007); Valis, Culture of Cursilería; Labanyi, Gender and Modernization; Jo Labanyi, ‘Negotiating modernity through the past: Costume films in the early Franco period’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 13:2–3 (2007), 241–58; Andrew Ginger, Liberalismo y romanticismo; Andrew Ginger, Painting and the Turn to Cultural Modernity in Spain: The Time of Eugenio Lucas Velázquez (1850–1870) (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2007). 21 In this respect, Edward Baker has alluded to the coexistence of the discursive practices of casticismo and cosmopolitanism and has insisted on the need to study Madrid’s popular culture as a porous endeavour wherein citizens are engaged at once in seemingly polarised activities, such as religious worship and mass entertainment. Baker, ‘Cómo se escribe una historia cultural: Madrid, 1900–1936’, Arte y Ciudad – Revista de Investigación, 1 (June 2013), 19–30. 22 See Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, a Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973); Charles Baudelaire, ‘The painter of modern life’ (1863), in J. Mayne (ed. and trans.), The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London: Phaidon Press, 1964). 23 Georg Simmel, ‘The metropolis and mental life’ (1903), in David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (eds.), Simmel on Culture (London: Sage, 1997), 174–86. 24 Jon May and Nigel Thrift (eds.), Timespace: Geographies of Temporality (London: Verso, 2001), esp. 10. Postmodern and Marxist theorists, especially Marshall Berman and David Harvey, consider modernity to be a paradoxical unity composed of multicausal features. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air. The Experience of Modernity (London: Penguin, 1988); David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003). 25 Andrew Ginger, ‘The modern moment: The dawn of cultural modernity’, in Helena Buffery et al. (eds.), Reading Iberia: History/theory/identity (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 100. 26 Andrew Ginger notes that there are different ways of stepping away from the Francocentric canon of modern art, but that the institutional weight of the French canon in the nineteenth century and in later academic debates cannot be ignored. Thus, alternative readings of modernity must explain culture at a deeper level: Painting and the Turn to Cultural Modernity, 15–16. 27 See, for example, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Pertti Anttonen, Tradition through Modernity: Postmodernism and



Introduction 23

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the Nation-State in Folklore Scholarship (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2005); Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (eds.), Global Modernities (London: Sage, 1995). 28 Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in NineteenthCentury London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 32. 29 The Global Urban History Project attests to the impact the global turn has had on the field of urban studies. http://globalurbanhistory.org/. 30 Mark Juergensmeyer, Thinking Globally: A Global Studies Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 5. 31 Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 3. 32 Ibid., esp. 20–1. 33 Cesari and Rigney, introduction to Cesari and Rigney (eds.), Transnational Memory, 2. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash propose rethinking modernity from a perspective that reconsiders the nation-state as the main framework for the study of experience and social life. They suggest a perspective that does not oppose globalisation to localisation, or homogenisation to heterogenisation. See their introduction to Featherstone, Lash, and Robertson (eds.), Global Modernities, esp. 1–2, 40–1. 34 See, for example, Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (London: Routledge, 2006). 35 Victor Roudometof, Glocalisation: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2016), 85. 36 Ibid., 90–1. 37 Richard Drayton and David Motadel have emphasised that global integration allowed even those citizens who were not mobile to engage with transnational processes: ‘Discussion: The futures of global history’, Journal of Global History, 13:1 (2018), 10. 38 Joachim Blatter, ‘Glocalisation’, in Mark Bevir (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Governance (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), 357–8. 39 Mestizo was defined as the animal or human offspring of mixed races in the Spanish, French, Italian dictionary Tesoro de las tres lenguas francesa, italiana y española (Geneva: Philippe Albert and Alexandre Pernet, 1609), 421. From the early nineteenth century, the Real Academia expanded the meaning of mestizo from animals to people of Spanish and American descent, and it specified the Latin form hybrus or hybridus as the etymological root. See, for example, Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua castellana compuesto por la Real Academia Española, reducido a un tomo para su más fácil uso, 4th ed. (Madrid: Viuda de Ibarra, 1830), 551. 40 Roudometof, Glocalization, 74. 41 Jason E. Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds.), Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 5. 42 Patricia Mainardi, Another World: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Print Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 10–11. 43 Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Fictions of the Feminine in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Press (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000);

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

24

Madrid on the move

Charnon-Deutsch, Hold That Pose, Visual Culture in the Late NineteenthCentury Spanish Periodical (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008); Bernardo Riego, La construcción social de la realidad a través del grabado informativo en la España del siglo XIX (Santander: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Cantabria, 2001); Vicente Pla Vivas, La ilustración gráfica del siglo XIX: Funciones y disfunciones (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2010); Marie-Linda Ortega (ed.), Ojos que ven, Ojos que leen: Textos e imágenes de la España isabelina (Madrid: Visor, 2004). 44 Stuart Hall, introduction to Hall and Paul du Gay (eds.), Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996), 7. As Hall sums up so well, if the transmission of an ideology is effective it is because it functions at two levels: ‘at the rudimentary levels of physical identity and drives and at the level of the discursive formation and practices which constitute the social field’ (7). 45 Jean-François Botrel, ‘La construcción de una nueva cultura del libro y del impreso en el siglo XIX’, in Jesús A. Martínez Martín (ed.), Orígenes culturales de la sociedad liberal (España siglo XIX) (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2003), 21–2. 46 Riego, La construcción social, 41, 46–7, 52. 47 In the early 1890s, the postcard publisher Hauser y Menet began reprinting illustrations formerly reproduced in Blanco y Negro. For a brief overview of this series, see Martín Carrasco Marqués, Tarjetas postales ilustradas de Madrid, 1887–1905 (Madrid: Ediciones La Librería, 2013), 92–4. On the relation between the contributors of Madrid Cómico and the género chico, see Margot Versteeg, Jornaleros de la pluma: La (re)definición del papel del escritor-­ periodista en la revista Madrid Cómico (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2011), 61. 48 As discussed by Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy, the concept of interocularity, which owes to Jonathan Crary, allows us to ‘place the humblest postcard or the ubiquitous product advertisement within the same analytical field as the grand history painting’. Introduction to ‘Section I: The Imperial Optic’, in Jay and Ramaswamy (eds.), Empires of Vision. A Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 27. The work they draw on is Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 49 Hill and Schwartz, Getting the Picture, 9. 50 Lucy H. Harney convincingly makes this point in relation to the musical genre of género chico: ‘Controlling resistance, resisting control: The género chico and the dynamics of mass entertainment in late nineteenth-century Spain’, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 10 (2006), 165. 51 Versteeg, Jornaleros de la pluma, 11. This idea is from Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature, ed. and trans. Randal Johnson (New York: Colombia University Press, 1993), 55. 52 Valeriano Bozal, La ilustración gráfica del siglo XIX en España (Madrid: Comunicación, 1979), 83. 53 Juan Miguel Sánchez Vigil, Revistas ilustradas en España: Del Romanticismo a la guerra civil (Gijón: Trea, D. L., 2008), 65.



Introduction 25

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

54 Marta Palenque, ‘Entre periodismo y literatura: Indefinición genérica y modelos de escritura entre 1875 y 1900’, in Luis F. Díaz Larios and Enrique Miralles (eds.), Del romanticismo al realismo: actas del I Coloquio de la Sociedad de Literatura Española del Siglo XIX (Barcelona: Universitat, 1998), 195–205. 55 Discursos leídos ante la Real Academia Española en la pública recepción del señor Don Isidoro Fernández Flórez el día 13 de noviembre de 1898 (Madrid: Est. Tip. de ‘El Libera’, 1898), 41; Discursos leídos ante la Real Academia Española en la recepción pública de Don Eugenio Sellés el día 2 de junio de 1895 (Madrid: Imp. de la ‘Revista de Navegación y Comercio’, 1895), 28. MarieLinda Ortega observes that although periodical publications were regarded as second-rate compared to the book format, many editors were engaged in both book and periodical projects: ‘Imaginar la lectura versus leer las imágenes’, Ayer, 58 (2005), 88–9.

1

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Seeing in the city: visually aware citizens

Nuestros abuelos periodistas no pudieron sospechar siquiera que las artes de la reproducción, entonces limitadas a la tipografía, a la litografía y al grabado en madera, aparte el daguerreotipo [sic], llegaran a tan singulares perfeccionamientos, a tan grandes maravillas como son la moderna fotografía, el fotograbado, la fototipia, la cromotipia, la olegorafía, el hueco grabado y otros procedimientos. ¿Qué revoluciones presenciarán en las artes que ­tuvieron por padre creador a Gutenberg, nuestros nietos, cronistas y reporteros? —León Roch (Francisco Pérez Mateos), 75 años de periodismo (Our journalist predecessors never foresaw that the arts of reproduction, then limited to typography, lithography, wood engraving, and the daguerreotype, could achieve such singular perfection, such great marvels like modern photography, photoengraving, phototype, chromotype, oleography, rotogravure, and other processes. What revolution in the arts that had Gutenberg as their father will our grandchildren, chroniclers, and reporters witness?)

In the nineteenth century, seeing, image-making, and urban life became entangled in new ways. As a result of urbanisation and novel technologies of image-making, audiences across European cities had access to new forms of leisure and were exposed to a variety of images and visual stimuli, from advertisements, posters, and broadsheets to illustrated periodicals and photographic portraits. Chroniclers and artists reflected on the effects of urbanisation and progress, and, at the same time, their works shaped perceptions of the developments under way. Seeing the city, on the one hand, and seeing in the city, on the other, became pivotal in defining metropolitan life and shaping nineteenth-century mentalities.1 More than any other form of imagery, illustrated print culture epitomised some of the beliefs of the age, emphasising the importance of affordability and profitability, circulation and mechanical reproduction, communication, and, last but not least, visual and commercial appeal. With the establishment of a solid printing industry, an international market of woodblocks and prints was created. Editors and publishers sought to remain informed in the latest printing techniques and were not shy in



Seeing in the city 27

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

a­ dopting and modifying foreign formats to best serve national needs and tastes. This moment was a turning point in the history of visual communication. A shared visual language to communicate news about the world as well as about local events was being forged. The press broadcast on issues like modernisation, urban renewal, leisure, and fashion in visual terms that transcended national boundaries but at the same time spoke from a local standpoint and showcased homegrown sketchers. The commercialisation of prints among different editorial ventures further galvanised the creation of a visual language that at once tackled international issues and highlighted local idiosyncrasies, paving the way for a citizenry that was not only visually educated but was also globally attuned to local contexts. Illustrated papers in Madrid and across Europe shared similar objectives: to sustain a stable readership, to communicate with readers visually, and to attract readers’ attention (and money) through images. In the mid-nineteenth century, several forms of print and visual culture emerged in Spanish city centres. The reign of Queen Isabel II (1833–68) was witness to a multiplicity of visual and textual messages that shaped the educated gaze.2 As the century progressed, citizens became more comfortable with navigating new city spaces and engaging with multiple types of printed images including illustrated gazettes, pictures reproduced in books, maps, and guidebooks. Furthermore, these years brought changes to Madrid’s landscape through the more established bourgeoisie, municipal regulation, and urban planning. Among the projects that changed the face of the capital was the restructuring of the Puerta del Sol and its environs, the expansion of Paseo de Recoletos, the provision of a water system and gas lighting, and the inauguration of Spain’s second railway, which linked Madrid to the town of Aranjuez, fifty kilometres to the south. The Restoration ­(1874–1931) saw in its first few decades the completion of a major project of urban expansion known as El Ensanche, which was designed to accommodate the growing middle class and clear out the capital’s overcrowded centre. Other developments included the creation of a public transport system, the opening of railway stations, and the construction of buildings with a more monumental and eclectic tone.3 These projects of urban renewal were in line with a generalised process of urbanisation that occurred in Western cities throughout the nineteenth century, albeit with varying rhythms, as a result of demographic growth, migration, and industrialisation. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Madrid’s population growth was modest compared to that of other European capitals and increased slightly more than 15 per cent from 1804 to 1846. Nevertheless, by 1877 Madrid had nearly 400,000 inhabitants, a figure that increased to 480,000 by 1888. That decade saw the most significant growth of the nineteenth century, and, while there were

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

28

Madrid on the move

fluctuations throughout the century, by 1900 the population had surpassed the half a million mark, increasing to nearly 540,000.4 As a result of these changes, urbanisation became a central topic in illustrated print culture, with images of city views and sweeping vistas dominating periodicals as well as guidebooks and maps. Mapmakers in Madrid used a variety of visual codes to communicate the urbanisation and new patterns of circulation and movement in the Spanish capital. Readers felt compelled to purchase these books and magazines thanks to the striking and detailed prints reproduced on their pages. In many ways, the central decades of the century set the foundations – in terms of technology, visuals, and urbanisation – for several projects and enterprises that gained pace in Madrid in the late nineteenth century. Although the 1868 revolution accelerated these transitions, it was during the Restoration, in the final decades of the century, that a number of urban projects came to fruition and the press and print industry increased its production significantly.5 Moreover, as evidenced in the creation of a professional association of etchers in 1874, it was only towards the 1860s and 1870s that the development of new engraving techniques allowed for inexpensive printmaking and galvanised the professionalisation of the trade.6 Yet, although the impact of modernisation on everyday life did not become fully evident until the second half of the century, visual representations of modernisation during the final decades of the century cannot be fully appreciated without considering the visual codes and concerns expressed in early nineteenth-century print culture. Too narrow a focus on the final decades of the century risks overshadowing the era’s fluid interplay between preexisting and contemporary practices and aesthetic styles. This chapter sets out to explore the ways in which nineteenth-century print media became increasingly preoccupied with sight, urbanisation, and visual communication. It discusses the connections between seeing, experiencing, and representing the modern city and sets the stage for the rest of the book by providing an overview of Madrid’s urban and visual landscape during the nineteenth century. Illustrated papers from places as disparate as Madrid, Paris, and New York put diverse visual cultures into dialogue with one another and found similar ways of communicating ideas on both international and national concerns. In Madrid, as in other parts of the world, people were becoming familiar with foreign and local issues and learning to visualise, represent, and navigate their city in new ways. Images of city views reproduced in the press, maps, and guidebooks both mirrored ideas regarding the effects of urban change and reflected on the act of seeing itself.



Seeing in the city 29

Appealing to the eye: spectatorship and the blind man

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

By the second half of the nineteenth century, popular print media used several mechanisms to engage the viewer. These mechanisms were the product of advances in visual and print technologies in the early nineteenth century. The 1830s opened a period of experimentation during which new systems of representation were forged at two levels. First, the number of printed pictures increased exponentially – from the penny magazine and serialised book to advertisements and ephemera.7 Second, there was an interest in optical technologies that built on experiments dating back to the eighteenth century. Interest in the mechanics of vision and the involvement of the unconscious became more widespread in the nineteenth century, not only encouraging experiments in the field of optical devices but also informing the work of artists and writers.8 The mobile modes of observation and panoramic views presented in the writings of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, and others point to changing attitudes towards urban spectatorship and visual technologies.9 These technologies included inventions like the panorama and diorama (which dated back to the eighteenth century), as well as magic lanterns, cosmoramas, and tableaux vivants. In Spain, these inventions were rehearsed in the middle decades of the century, whereas in Great Britain and France they had developed a few decades earlier.10 Crucial to our understanding of spectatorship is Jonathan Crary’s 1992 study on nineteenth-century observation, which looked beyond established accounts of modern art and incorporated overlooked visual technologies into the narrative of modernity. While Crary’s views have been contested by later studies, his assessment is fundamental in that it brought previously overlooked optical devices to the discipline of art history and the narrative of nineteenth-century modernity and thus contested the idea that there had been a clear rupture between previous modes of representation and impressionist painting.11 Seeing past this narrative of rupture, we are able to reframe the relationship between representation and seeing as fluid, rather than in the abrupt terms suggested by the schemas of modern art and its historical classifications. The physiologies and sketches of social mores (artículos de costumbres) of the 1830s and 1840s concerned themselves with shifting attitudes towards vision. This shift was epitomised by the flâneur or city stroller, a character type present in albums of social types and physiological literature, typically presented as an urban male citizen actively observing his surroundings.12 In the second half of the nineteenth century, in contrast, the interest in urban observation would move from a sociological categorisation of the urban environment towards more introspective forms of observation.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

30

Madrid on the move

Conversely, the inability to engage in visual observation was also a frequent theme, as evidenced in the figure of the blind man (el ciego) and the trope of blindness, a social type and a condition whose prominence in nineteenth-century European culture attests to the significance of practices of seeing.13 The trope of the blind man was used in literature, painting, journalism, and popular culture, and it appeared in a variety of printed media, from Henry Mayhew’s study of the poor of London (1851) to the collection of social types featured in both Los españoles pintados por sí mismos (The Spanish described by themselves, 1844) and the weekly Semanario Pintoresco Español (Spanish Picturesque Weekly) (figure 1.1).14

1.1  Leonardo Alenza, ‘Gritos de Madrid. El ciego’, Semanario Pintoresco Español, 16 (21 April 1839), 125

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Seeing in the city 31

1.2  Advertisement for Salón de Limpia-botas de Agustín Riquer, El Mundo Cómico, 4 (April 1872), 8

He was also represented in European illustrated papers and in the Spanish satirical and illustrated press during the Restoration, where the form was reworked to fit contemporary concerns (figure 1.2). Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the blind man appeared in optical devices such as stereoscopic cards and photographic surveys of social types, which in turn were reproduced in related media like the postcard (figure 1.3). The conventionalised motif also crossed over to the field of literature and was deployed by costumbrista and realist authors alike, including Mesonero Romanos, Pérez Galdós, and Emilia Pardo Bazán.15 The role of the blind man varied depending on the medium in which the figure appeared but, in broad terms, the motif appears to have served two purposes in visual culture. On the one hand, it called to mind the social effects of poverty and was frequently linked to the social type of the beggar (mendigo), who was commonly represented as a blind man. On the other, it highlighted the importance of seeing and navigating the city. In Victorian visual culture, the presence of the blind man magnified the supremacy of sight and the importance of other senses for metropolitan life.16 In a similar

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

32

Madrid on the move

1.3  ‘El ciego de la noria’ (The waterwheel blind man), postcard, ca. 1900. Colección Cánovas, serie C

way, the final paragraphs of ‘El ciego’ (The Blind, 1844) in Los españoles pintados por sí mismos underscore the blind man’s sensorial involvement in Madrid’s streetscape alongside his lack of sight: Y finalmente, cuando otro recurso no le queda, contémplale, lector, hecho un Hércules, que lleva a Madrid en la mano, con sus calles y plazuelas, iglesias y conventos, hospicios y hospitales, y cuantos establecimientos públicos quiera recorrer en un momento el curioso viajero.17 (And finally, when he has no other recourse left, observe him, reader, as strong as Hercules, holding Madrid in his hand, with its streets, squares, churches and convents, hospices and hospitals, and any public places a curious traveller should want to visit.)

The author describes the blind man as an integral yet displaced inhabitant of the city, whose presence draws attention to the one sense he lacks  – sight. The figure of el ciego in print culture acquired force through the contradictory relationship between his pitiable lack of sight and his outlandish sense of prowess. His presence gained even more strength as it was tied to a long-standing theme in literary narratives and had the ability to tap into the reader’s visual memory, evoking, for example, images of the medieval mendicant with a cane. The interest in vision that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century not only involved the act of looking



Seeing in the city 33

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

at representations; it also contributed to forging what Kate Flint has called the ‘visual imagination’. There was a tension between outward and inward seeing, between observation and imagination.18 Audiences’ understandings of familiar topics like the blind man were the result of imagination, on the one hand, and representation and collective memory, on the other. Someone encountering a drawing of el ciego or the passage quoted above would recognize the attributes of the blind man, linking him to previous literary and artistic representations, but would also infuse the character type with additional meanings due to the relevance printed media and vision had acquired. During the nineteenth century, reproductions of printed engravings helped shape the ‘collective imaginary’ of readers and spectators,19 an imaginary whose signs and representations were mediated both by personal experience and by extant structures of visual knowledge. The blind man, for example, was imprinted in the collective visual memory of the nineteenthcentury spectator much like the saints and protagonists of biblical stories.20 With a long-standing presence in visual culture due to medieval sculpture and Renaissance paintings of the miracles of Christ, the blind man had as his prime iconographical attribute a cane. With the arrival of new printing methods and urban renovation projects, the figure of the blind man was reworked towards the middle decades of the nineteenth century. He gradually acquired additional meanings beyond mendicancy and charity – and, paradoxically, sight – and the motif of the blind man became intertwined with urban spectatorship. Leonardo Alenza’s depiction of el ciego in a series of engravings called ‘Gritos de Madrid’ (Cries of Madrid, 1839) in Semanario Pintoresco Español represented the enigmatic blind man and his experience of metropolitan life. He was clearly identifiable as blind due to his cane and impoverished demeanour, but he now sold ‘extraordinary news’, stopping at nothing to do so, as was narrated in the accompanying poem. This depiction of el ciego alluded to the already common figure of el ciego de los romances (the blind man of ballads), a vendor of cheap print and pamphlets known as literatura de cordel whose existence can be traced back to the sixteenth century.21 The updated convention of the blind man as a seller of the latest news was reprised in 1863 by costumbrista Antonio Flores in his volume Ayer, hoy y mañana (Yesterday, today and tomorrow), where there is a brief reference to ‘el ciego vendedor de impresos’ (the blind newspaper vendor).22 The figure of el ciego can be interpreted as a sign of permanence and popular wisdom within an unstable political and social context.23 But depictions of the blind man also point to changing attitudes towards urban spectatorship and practices of seeing. The conventionalised figure was more than just an outmoded artistic trope. It connected preexisting structures

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

34

Madrid on the move

of visual knowledge and novel modes of dealing with visual experience and the urban environment. Seeing, remembering, and representing were intertwined. Costumbrista authors like Antonio Flores drew connections between the street vendor – a conventional street type – and the mechanisms of modern advertising. During this period, signs, newspaper kiosks, and billboards prompted new ways of seeing and experiencing the city across Europe and North America.24 Flores saw a connection between the preexisting gritos (cries) of old-style street vendors and the novel shop signs with their bright letras de oro (golden letters) hanging high above shop windows, and he advised readers to open their eyes and close their ears.25 The distinctive cries of street vendors constituted a trope that appeared in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prints from Madrid to London and New York.26 Street criers were also featured extensively in early illustrated journals in Spain like Museo de las Familias and nineteenth-century gazettes.27 By comparing the well-known cries to printed media and advertising, Flores put the spotlight on the nexus between past and present forms of visual and even sensorial experience. New inventions and forms of visual communication had a pronounced impact on city dwellers, and, as a result, a large part of the cultural production of the nineteenth century was devoted to dealing with these transformations – as the figure of the blind man makes clear. Indeed, that the multiplicity of visual stimuli shaped experience in nineteenth-century cities has become a commonplace in scholarly literature. This line of thought owes much to Georg Simmel’s 1904 study in which he framed urban life in terms of corporeal and emotional experience triggered by external and internal stimuli.28 Technological innovations introduced in the nineteenth century may seem to have forced people to operate in a disjunctive urban space.29 However, the endurance and popularity of certain tropes like el ciego imply that the experience of modernisation was dealt with in a more fluid and conscious way. While it is true that social and ideological conventions, as well as feelings of nostalgia and loss, were perpetuated through these sorts of archetypes, these depictions also show a profound engagement with modernisation and shifting visual practices. As I will discuss in subsequent chapters, the ongoing presence and reworking of urban archetypes and motifs provide insight into how urban renewal was mediated and managed through a familiar visual language, thus suggesting that modernisation did not represent an abrupt rupture between former visual models and practices and contemporary ones.



Seeing in the city 35

Cross-connections: the illustrated press across borders

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Of the new forms of visual media that emerged in the nineteenth century, the illustrated press would prove to be one of the most groundbreaking. As noted by Jason Hill and Vanessa Schwartz, the news picture stood at the crossroads between two features that shaped collective experience: information and mechanical reproduction. Unlike art, the informative picture’s ‘optimal public’ is the most generalised one, rather than an exclusive community.30 Between 1834 and 1921, roughly 350 publications containing the words pintoresco (picturesque), museo (museum), or ilustración (illustration) in their title were published in Spain, a phenomenon that peaked around 1885. These terms indicated to readers that the newspapers contained reproductions of engravings.31 The periodicals were geared towards different types of readers and covered a range of themes from feminine etiquette and religion to literature and science. The foundations of the illustrated press can be traced back to the picture magazines of the 1830s and 1840s. These early publications displayed two elements that would prove to be foundational to the success of this medium throughout the century: they developed a visual–verbal semantic to convey complex messages; and they prompted a network of mutual influences that transcended different media, cultural contexts, and national boundaries. These cross-connections were propelled by the print revolution heralded by the English penny press in the 1830s.32 Across Europe, early illustrated magazines drew inspiration from the penny press and were published under similar titles, containing words like pittoresque (French) and pintoresco and panorama (Spanish) – as was the case with El Panorama (Madrid, 1838–41) and O Panorama (Lisbon, published with some interruptions between 1837 and 1868). The pintoresco publications of mid-century Spain were more than just a forerunner to the illustrated magazines that rose to popularity in the second half of the century. Not only did they set the foundations for the technological and illustrative developments that would follow but they also helped forge a conceptual framework for a visually initiated audience. Martina Lauster has placed the early illustrated press at the centre of a ‘visual–­cognitive culture’. These periodicals affected the visual literacy of their readership through novel woodcut technologies that made it possible to print words and pictures on the same page. The pintoresco periodicals, like the penny press before them, overcame what Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone have termed the ‘conceptual boundary’ that had hitherto existed between images and words.33 Following these developments, it was in the second half of the century that the illustrated press really came into being,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

36

Madrid on the move

and moved from the format developed by Semanario Pintoresco Español consisting in protracted paragraphs and pictorial sketches to the larger and more elaborate prints known as ilustraciones (illustrations). The touchstone magazine of the period in Spain, La Ilustración Española y Americana, was inspired by European periodicals of the time, like the French L’Illustration, the Illustrated London News, or Berlin’s Illustrirte Zeitung.34 La Ilustración Española y Americana also built on ideas from earlier magazines including Semanario Pintoresco Español, Museo de las Familias, and La Ilustración, the paper founded by Ángel Fernández de los Ríos in 1849. However, it was not until Abelardo de Carlos purchased El Museo Universal and restyled it as La Ilustración Española y Americana in 1869 that a more established illustrated press industry flourished in Madrid. To commemorate its anniversary several decades later, the magazine traced its prehistory from the first Spanish illustrated periodical, El Artista (1835–36), to the present day and compared its development to British and French papers of the period.35 This periodical, which was published until 1921, incorporated a novel layout and innovative technological methods on a par with other European papers and paved the way for a more structured and professionalised industry. The paper was intended for middle- and upper-middle-class subscribers and quickly reached a run of two thousand, which was a major feat for the period.36 It was the benchmark publication of its time and set the standard for smaller editorial ventures. The paper drew from a large pool of collaborators and financial and technological resources. Thanks to these resources, it featured more elaborate and imposing illustrations than those seen in smaller ventures like La Ilustración de Madrid or satiric magazines, which, of course, had different objectives in terms of their readers’ expectations, resources, and content. Although it was not until the 1890s that a mass press emerged in Spain, from the 1880s there was a significant increase in numbers and circulation of periodicals.37 It was also during this period that Madrid established itself as Spain’s main editorial hub and distributor of both books and magazines. Literacy levels among the city’s middle class increased, particularly among landlords and landowners, businessmen, civil servants, and, to a lesser degree, people in the trade and service sector.38 In 1877, literacy increased in Spain by 55,000 readers per year and by 1900 this figure reached 90,000. Although the level of illiteracy remained high, the surge of printed media exposed people to written culture and reproductions of images.39 While the more lavish magazines like La Ilustración Española y Americana were geared towards the upper middle class and priced accordingly, more modest gazettes such as satirical periodicals targeted a broader strata of the middle class. For example, the readership of Madrid Cómico ­(1880–1923), one of the most successful and long-lasting comic gazettes of the Restoration, mirrors this growth of the literate, urban middle class, counting among



Seeing in the city 37

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

its readers lawyers, doctors, and engineers.40 As the century progressed, the illustrated press concentrated on issues related to urban life. Madrid’s papers dealt deftly with aspects related to the capital. The 1883 Ley de policía de imprenta (Law on the policy of the press) introduced by the liberal Prime Minister Sagasta allowed for a certain degree of liberalisation of the press and facilitated the formation of new editorial ventures.41 From 1875 to 1895, more than one hundred humorous magazines were launched in Spain. While humour magazines like Madrid Cómico have been considered conservative and anti-modernist, they also played a vital role in forming a community of readers and fostering the development of the press as a form of mass entertainment.42 With the exception of Madrid Cómico, satirical magazines were short-lived, indicating the competitive state of the market. Their small run and short duration was also due to the fact that the Spanish press industry still lacked sufficient financial investment  to operate on domestic technology and imported foreign equipment.43 By 1892, Madrid produced eighty-seven scientific and artistic magazines, and Barcelona produced twenty-nine. From 1888 to 1892, scientific and artistic journals were the most popular category of periodicals, with other formerly important genres like religion and politics lagging behind.44 During the final decades of the nineteenth century, illustrated magazines across the globe shared similar formats, layouts, and thematic interests. They included pieces on current affairs and events, fashion, literature, and art and science, and they tended to have a final section devoted to advertisements and games. Spanish periodicals featured pictures of local events drawn by Spanish graphic artists as well as reproductions of paintings by renowned national and international artists. La Ilustración Española y Americana owed much of its success to its ability to adjust foreign methods of visual communication to a national audience. As a result, a commercial exchange between European illustrated periodicals was established. La Ilustración Española y Americana reproduced paintings by French artists and, to a lesser degree, German and British painters.45 It also commissioned works by the British engraver Esteban Pannemaker with the condition that they be reproduced simultaneously in L’Illustration and the Illustrated London News.46 Spanish publishers’ success depended on remaining up to date on Parisian developments, and there was fierce competition to buy the copyright of foreign plates to bring down costs.47 Not only did this situation give rise to an international exchange of engravings, it also spurred discussions between magazines about the reproduction of images and their take on foreign subject matter. This transnational exchange, visible from the print revolution of the 1840s, allowed for certain visual tropes to transcend cultural boundaries and, as a result, familiarised the reader with foreign visual cultures. These

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

38

Madrid on the move

magazines were not shy about revealing the exchange of engravings to their readership. For example, in 1881 the Barcelona-based periodical La Ilustración celebrated the fact that an illustration featured in La Ilustración Española y Americana had been reprinted in the New York paper the Daily Graphic and congratulated the artists for such an achievement.48 Similarly, Abelardo de Carlos, La Ilustración Española y Americana’s owner and editor, was candid about the paper’s commercial partnerships with other publications, and in 1876 he referred to New York’s Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper as its ‘apreciable colega’ (esteemed colleague).49 In a similar act of praise, Frank Leslie’s ran a lengthy article on de Carlos accompanied by a large portrait. The article portrayed the editor as a successful self-made man who had put the Spanish illustrated press industry on the international map.50 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper was itself no stranger to borrowing engravings from European periodicals. From 1866 to 1890 it included a section titled ‘The Pictorial Spirit of the Illustrated Foreign Press’, which featured news pictures from around the globe as well as images of foreign customs from China and Japan to Australia and the West Indies. ‘The Pictorial Spirit’ concentrated on exceptional events, like world fairs or new housing projects for Madrid’s working class, as well as on trivial incidents and foreign customs that could be interesting or even exotic to North American readers. Such was the case of an infant’s funeral in Madrid – a theme that also captured the eye of Spanish draftsmen and was reprised in La Ilustración Española y Americana a decade later.51 Frank Leslie’s ran an illustration of the infant’s funeral in the centre segment of the right-hand column, alongside reports of events occurring in Germany, England, and Japan. The funeral was, in the words of the paper, striking ‘to a foreign traveller’ due to its gaiety (figure 1.4). The brief article went on to explain that this mood was due to religious doctrines in Spain and the belief that the baby was free of sin, which allowed for a less mournful passing.52 Just as the new printing techniques ushered in cognitive shifts during the early days of the illustrated press, this kind of layout allowed readers to apprehend distant places in just one glance and create new associations. This funeral was not the only instance in which events in Madrid were afforded attention in Frank Leslie’s. The gazette ran illustrations of the Spanish capital on several occasions. It gave extensive coverage to the king’s public appearances, from displays of public pageantry on Madrid’s streets, including what the paper called ‘rue de Alcalá’ (street of Alcalá), to his wedding with Princess Mercedes, which was even featured on the front page.53 It was not King Alfonso XII himself who merited the front page but the princess and her ladies in waiting, as the occasion presented a unique opportunity to showcase female fashions and the latest European style.

Seeing in the city 39

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



1.4  ‘The Pictorial Spirit of the European Illustrated Press’, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1040 (4 September 1875), 440

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

40

Madrid on the move

The texts that accompanied reprints of foreign illustrations and images of foreign events highlighted the particularities of foreign cultures as well as cross-cultural similarities. This practice created associations between different countries and brought to the fore aspects with which local readers could identify. In Spain, for example, a variety of strategies were used to draw attention to these cross-cultural connections, from straightforward analogies like ‘el rastro lisbonense’ (the Lisbon rastro) – a term that alluded to Madrid’s popular flea markets – to more shrewd reflections on shared cultural practices.54 Overall, two elements were stressed: the importance of the image as a vehicle of communication that opened local publics to events happening across the globe, and the existence of a similar idea of modernisation that, nonetheless, played out in different ways depending on the local setting.55 At a time when national identities were being shaped in Europe and the Americas, and when industrialisation was creating an interconnected economy and leisure market, these visual narratives show a pervasive concern with the reconciliation of local and global interests. The press drew from homegrown illustrators and journalists to articulate from a local standpoint what audiences viewed as a universal idea of modernisation. In the midst of controversy about the reach of the press and discussions about new legislation, one Spanish senator went as far as to say that the printing press was ‘la lengua del mundo’ (the language of the world).56 The exchanges between European and North American illustrated papers further galvanised the creation of an international visual language that at once tackled foreign subjects and highlighted local idiosyncrasies, paving the way for a community, not only of visually educated citizens but of ­citizens who were globally attuned to their local contexts. International connections were made most visible on the final pages of Madrid’s well-established newspapers and high-end illustrated magazines, where these periodicals used advertisements to target a readership with growing purchasing power. Despite the existence of international business partnerships, transatlantic entrepreneurial relationships were sometimes only visible in the ‘faint traces’ left in the one to two pages of advertisements  promoting services and products from local and international ­providers.57 From the mid-1800s, papers combined written advertisements with intricate drawings. Hygiene, anti-ageing, and French beauty products were particularly predominant in the Spanish press, anticipating the success of a fledgling health and cosmetic industry. The last page of an 1883 issue of La Iberia, one of Madrid’s leading newspapers of the final decades of the nineteenth century, offers a clear example of these advertisements. On a single page one could learn of French medicinal essences from Paris; British capsules and hair products sold on Madrid’s Carrera San Jerónimo; transatlantic voyages conducted by the Compañía Trasatlántica, founded



Seeing in the city 41

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

in Cuba by the Spaniard Antonio López y López around 1850; and an Italian steamboat company with routes between Genoa and Buenos Aires with stops in Cádiz and Montevideo. Modest businesses from Madrid also featured small ads, promoting services such as lodgings for students or a doctor’s practice treating syphilis and infertility (figure 1.5). The condensed, single-page grouping of these products and services gave readers a compact view of the world and what it had to offer, adjusting foreign commodities to a local context and audience. Thus, the world was brought in a single glance to the reader, who, therefore, did not need to be mobile in order to engage with developments occurring elsewhere.58 Being modern and cosmopolitan did not require having first-hand experience of distant places or purchasing foreign commodities but rather feeling that one was participating in a transnational network of knowledge and fashion. The transnational character of the press and the printed image was echoed in the new press law, Ley de policía de imprenta, issued in 1883. The discussions that this law sparked among members of Congress interrogated the regulatory mechanisms that should be in place for a new type of industry that crossed national borders. The new law drew from similar French and German regulations, issued in 1874 and 1883 respectively, and, together with laws in the United States and Great Britain, it set the ­foundations for a jurisprudence of the press.59 One member of Congress compared the approach taken by different countries and pointed out that the new regulation granted the graphic artist and writer equal privileges, which helped tackle the kind of censorship that artists encountered in Turkey and Russia.60 The new law was born from the need to update the existing, outdated regulation and eliminate punitive measures that restricted freedom of the press. It aimed to find ways to regulate a new kind of industry – one that was based on mass production and that had the potential to connect nations on both a commercial and a cultural level. It was in this context that Spain’s legislators consulted and assessed foreign regulation. One of the aspects covered in the new law was the right to prohibit the circulation of printed images and publications written in Spanish but published in foreign countries. Just a few months earlier, members of congress even discussed to what extent publications in foreign languages and circulating in Spain should be regulated (an aspect that was ultimately left out of the law) given that more people could read a foreign language like French.61 The cross-national underpinnings of the press industry, therefore, were not only visible in the commercial exchange of prints and the networks of contacts editors forged but in the regulations that legislators and politicians conceived. The new press law consisted of twenty-one articles and paid special attention to the status of the image as a vehicle of communication that was just as powerful as words. The law brought to the fore the notion that the image

Madrid on the move

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

42

1.5  La Iberia, 7676 (7 October 1881)

was an evolving, mechanically produced product. The first article began by stipulating that thoughts and ideas could be expressed by way of the printed word, lithography, photography, or any other sort of technology that might arise in the future – a shrewd move by the legislature because it permitted



Seeing in the city 43

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the present law to contemplate future reforms in printed and visual media. The second article moved on to specify that along with books, pamphlets, broadsheets, and newspapers, images on paper qualified as printed media and were considered as such under the law regardless of whether they were part of a book or newspaper. These sorts of images included: ‘dibujos, litografías, fotografías, grabados, estampas, medallas, emblemas, viñetas y cualquier otra producción de esta índole’ (drawings, lithographies, photographs, engravings, prints, medals, emblems, vignettes, and any other products of this kind). At the heart of the new law and the debates it prompted were two key issues. First, the law left room for future developments and in this way acknowledged the changing face of image-making and its role in the public sphere. This attitude towards the reproduction of images was echoed in subsequent histories of journalism, such as the 1923 book 75 años de periodismo (75 years of journalism) by León Roch. The book enumerated the different techniques that had developed in the press, from early typography and lithography to photoengraving and collotype, and concluded that the door for innovation continued to be open and that it was impossible to foresee future revolutions in image-making.62 Second, the legal context reflected on society’s attitudes towards images and their changing status from high art to a device of mass communication. Rather than defining images as art, the law considered them to be mechanically produced vehicles of communication and, as such, they needed to be regulated. In this sense, they had the same status and obligations as the written word. What the law ultimately confirmed was the status of the image as part of a broader visual language.

Seeing worlds unknown

Most illustrated publications across Europe and North America shared two main goals. Editorial enterprises all had different agendas depending on their geographic location and ideological leanings, but they first and foremost aimed to be financially viable and to expand their readership – or at least to sustain a stable base. Whatever a newspaper’s or book’s focus – be it local or international news, quotidian or extraordinary events – c­ ommunicating in visual terms that appealed to an audience was what guaranteed its sustainability. Illustrated papers thus placed visual communication at the core of their editorial mission. These objectives (readership and visual communication) were present in the early days of the penny press, a forerunner that demonstrated the grip that pictures had on both literate and illiterate audiences. The penny press’s formula was imitated and improved on in more sophisticated publications of the mid-century like those that adapted

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

44

Madrid on the move

these principles to a middle-class readership. Because illustrations were essential to the success of these publications, some magazines – among them L’Illustration and El Museo Universal, the predecessor of La Ilustración Española y Americana – included in their first issue a declaration of intent that broadcasted their focus on visual communication. These declarations were not merely statements of objectives; they also constituted reflections on the very act of seeing. These dual concerns of readership and visual communication were shared by the European illustrated press throughout the nineteenth century, from the early penny press and pintoresco publications of the 1830s and 1840s to the illustrated and humour publications of the more established press industry that would arise. Especially notable among periodicals’ declarations of intent were reflections linking the readership’s ability to see with its capacity to imagine and remember. The first issue of L’Illustration noted that its strength rested not only on its ability to inform about current affairs but in its capacity to do so visually and thus fulfil the changing needs of its audience, which, thanks to the images, would better understand the event at hand. L’Illustration’s editorial note declared that illustrated magazines strove to revitalise and broaden the scope of visual communication, distancing itself from the pintoresco weeklies that had preceded it. The periodical promised to offer striking bird’s-eye views and to make the world smaller and more comprehensible by showing works of art as well as events and ‘les choses de tous les jours’ (everyday things). Overall, the magazine aimed to ‘frapper les yeux’ (strike the eyes).63 This objective was achieved not only by refining techniques practised in the picturesque magazines but by building on visual language that was familiar to the reader. In a similar way, the Spanish urbanist and chronicler Ángel Fernández de los Ríos linked the lure of illustrations to the collective imagination and believed that prints had the potential to ‘apoderarse de la memoria, y de fijar las ideas por imágenes’ (take over memory, and imprint ideas through images).64 The opening statement of L’Illustration also alluded to the reader’s visual knowledge and the connections between accuracy and the imagination. The magazine declared that, unlike vague descriptions, illustrations ensured that people could really imagine an event. Today, we tend to associate representation with subjectivity and to question the source of the news image. However, during this period, the image (and the imagination) held connotations of veracity, informativity, and presence – qualities that were highlighted in Spanish publications of the period like Semanario Pintoresco Español and La Ilustración.65 The printed image had the power to imaginatively transport the reader to an unknown place and, as a result, provided a more realistic take on the issue, event, or place at hand. The periodicals exhibited what scholars have referred to as a self-­ conscious commitment to establishing a visual relation to the world outside



Seeing in the city 45

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

the image – that is, to the event, person, or place that had inspired the picture.66 Thus imagination and knowledge were not incompatible but rather complemented each other and enhanced the correct interpretation of an informative picture. In fact, journalists commonly critiqued inaccuracy in illustrations, and artists were shunned when they took reality into their own hands.67 The parameters that defined what constituted reality were, of course, laden with subjectivity. Nonetheless, these observations are valuable reflections on the objectives and mechanisms of illustrated print media and its relationship with the elusive notion of truth. This discussion was, in part, intensified by the gradual introduction of photomechanical techniques, which brought two types of media – drawings and photographs – into coexistence until the turn of the century. The appeal to strike the eyes – ‘frapper les yeux’ – extended to other European periodicals beyond L’Illustration. Fernández de los Ríos played with a similar, though toned down, metaphor when he demanded in 1854 that illustrations were meant to ‘hablar a los ojos’ (speak to the eyes).68 This expression had also appeared three years earlier, in 1851, in the Illustrated London News. A reprinted article titled ‘Speaking to the Eye’ heralded the innovation and value of the illustrated press. The text emphasised the mechanisms of seeing and the rising popularity of printed images across Europe. It also surmised contemporary ideas regarding the association between representation and veracity: Our great authors are now artists. They speak to the eye, and their language is fascinating and impressive. The events of the day or week are illustrated or described by the pencil; and so popular is the mode of communication, that illustrated newspapers are becoming common all over Europe. … The result is a facility of illustrating past events truly and graphically, which makes the artist, as much or more than the writer, the historian of our times. … If the modern improvements in the art of transmitting a knowledge of events by pencil, be more efficacious in diffusing knowledge than the art of printing words, may we not expect it to be the forerunner of changes greater than printing has hitherto brought forward.69

The article concluded by reflecting on the illustrated press’s breadth and reach in comparison to high art, and on the active role that the spectator/ consumer played in defining the contents of the magazine and, ultimately, its market value. The implications of the mechanical reproduction of art and the tension between mass production and high art were also a subject of public debate. The first issue of El Museo Universal, published in 1857, championed the press for its status as an effective vehicle of communication.70 Despite being written in a more grandiose and literary tone than its European counterparts, the periodical’s declaration addressed what would

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

46

Madrid on the move

be a fundamental issue from the 1839 invention of photography to well into the twentieth century: the coexistence of art and mechanical reproduction, of the high principles of artistic creation and the transitory and ephemeral qualities of industry and progress. Such sentiments and debates would be echoed in the 1860s in the writings of John Ruskin and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, who, like other purists, displayed reticence towards the medium of photography and its cold mechanical qualities.71 Despite photography’s detractors, by 1863 there were thirty-nine photographic studios in Madrid, and consumers had become accustomed to exchanging cartes de visites, small photographic portraits mounted on pieces of cardboard.72 The press was, nonetheless, the vehicle through which photography was finally massproduced and popularised in the 1880s and 1890s, first in the United States with the reproduction of the first semitone photograph in the Daily Graphic, and later in Spain following the experiments with photographic techniques introduced by La Ilustración Española y Americana, La Ilustración Ibérica, and La Ilustración Artística.73 These experiments drew on a preexisting relationship between photography and the illustrated press, as evidenced in illustrations printed with the caption de fotografía (from photography). As a mass-produced product itself, the press gradually encouraged the use of photography as a visual form of communication and owed much of its success to this medium, as was the case with La Ilustración Española y Americana.74 The 1857 declaration in El Museo Universal concluded on an optimistic note by heralding the ability of technological progress to perpetuate and enhance the eternal qualities of art, or, in other words, to merge high and low art: La ciencia y la industria son hermanas inseparables: cantaremos juntas sus glorias y palidecerán de seguro los héroes de Ossian ante el que, cual otro Prometeo, arrebató el rayo de las nubes, o ante el que forzó la naturaleza a reproducirse a sí misma en el fondo de una cámara oscura. Cada obstáculo destruido por la industria hemos visto que es para el hombre un paso más en camino de lo infinito.75 (Science and industry are inseparable sisters: we will together praise their glories, and the heroes of Ossian will surely pale before one who, like Prometheus, strips the clouds of lightning, or before one who forces nature to duplicate itself in the depth of the camera obscura. We have seen that each obstacle destroyed by industry represents one more step for man along the path towards infinity.)

This concern with image-making signals a crucial moment in the history of consumerism, in which acts of purchase, display, and sight became bound up with one another. Newspapers were blatant in championing not only their individual successes but also the growing reach of the illustrated magazine.



Seeing in the city 47

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

These promotional techniques were symptomatic of a middle-class culture increasingly based on consumerism and display. The press participated in the techniques of spectacle and display that were concurrently developed in exhibition spaces, shops, and commercial businesses throughout the second half of the century – concerns that were crystallised in the motif of the shop window. Articles like ‘Speaking to the Eye’ were also instruments of self-promotion that championed the status of the illustrated press as ‘a medium for modernity’.76 This article’s accompanying illustration depicted passers-by lining up in front of a shop window to steal a glance of the latest issue. This formula was also used in an 1864 print promoting the newly founded Societé des Aquafortistes in France.77 Similarly, the papers La Ilustración and El Solfeo pictured passers-by in Madrid looking at shop windows or advertisements promoting publications such as Benito Pérez Galdós’s novels Episodios Nacionales (National Episodes, 1872–1912).78 Bookshops displayed open-paged copies of La Ilustración Española y Americana to attract customers, especially in the wake of important events like the death of Alfonso XII.79 Notably, this association between print and public space dates back to the early part of the century, when caricaturists exploited the trope of passers-by gathering in front of print shops to get a closer look at the satirical prints on view.80 As the century progressed, these kinds of ­illustrations became less anecdotal, and the relationship between ­consumption, display, and urban observation took centre stage. This development became evident in La Ilustración Española y Americana and its illustrations of commercial, industrial, and artistic exhibitions during the 1880s, a period when several exhibitions were held in Madrid, coinciding with the bourgeois emphasis on luxury and material culture in the Restoration.81 Pérez Galdós returned to the trope of striking the eye in 1881, describing these years as a moment when shopkeepers were becoming skilled in the art of presenting their goods, ‘halagando los ojos del que compra’ (flattering the eyes of the customer).82 In order for this relationship between the object on display and the consumer’s gaze to work, the object needed to be attractive, and the spectator’s gaze needed to be trained to respond accordingly.83 In a self-promotional move, La Ilustración Española y Americana published an image of the exhibition space it occupied at the 1885 Exposición Literaria y Artística (figure 1.6). The illustration was accompanied by a brief text that listed the objects on view, but the image did not emphasise the listed objects themselves. Rather, it focused on a female spectator and her inviting gaze. Her presence was a ‘visual anchor’ meant to draw viewers in and encourage them to observe the illustrations on display in what appears to be a three-way exchange of glances.84 Images that featured a person at the exact moment they were observing something created a feeling of dislocation in the audience, pulling them from outside

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

48

Madrid on the move

1.6  ‘Sala donde se halla la instalación de nuestro periódico, en la Exposición Literaria y Artística, – de fotografía de Laurent’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 1 (8 January 1885), 4

observer to active participant in the picture’s narrative.85 Regardless of whether it was a circuitous advertising technique, the illustration is noteworthy both because it signalled the development of new methods of selfpromotion and because it put the spotlight on the dynamics of a visually initiated audience able to participate in this web of glances. In addition to encountering illustrated print media in public space, audiences in Madrid also engaged with illustrated print media in more private and intimate settings. By the end of the nineteenth century, the press had lost its aura of permeance, and readers had developed a different relationship with the medium.86 Furthermore, during the second half of the century there was a ‘culte des images’ (cult of the image) across the West, as reproductions were distributed and accessed in new ways.87 Thanks to advances in printing technologies, reproductions and printed ephemera reached wider audiences, and a taste for collecting and handling images developed. Printed ephemera, from broadsheets to advertising cards and illustrated papers, had the potential to function as promotional objects and public images but could also operate in intimate spaces. However, elucidating how



Seeing in the city 49

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

this ‘culte’ operated in everyday life is not an easy task as there is there is little evidence regarding experience vis-à-vis the printed image. Some documents, however, do offer insight into how print media spurred emotion and was mediated in private space. The practice of engraving dates back to the early modern age, and, even then, prints circulated and allowed readers to appropriate images and alter their original intent.88 In the early years of the illustrated press, the reproduction of engravings on a weekly basis constituted a novelty, as did their publication in such an ephemeral format. This sentiment was echoed in an 1844 article in Semanario Pintoresco Español that presented readers with a list of recommendations for the use of its prints.89 The paper highlighted the prints’ potential for entertainment, their timely and realistic communication of news, their expediency and affordability, and their ability to shape and refine taste. From the early days of the picture press, editors were concerned with shaping audiences’ response to illustrations in both the public and private sphere. Despite their efforts to control this experience, however, the ways that people looked at and managed images transcended the Semanario’s list, especially as the century progressed and new forms of print culture became available to the urban classes. Different forms of printed media were available to the middle and upper urban classes in Madrid. Women took to gathering printed ephemera, such as labels, calendars, photographs, and prints, and they arranged them in elaborate albums and collages.90 Another common pastime consisted in exchanging the cardboard cartes de visites. These small mementos are indicative of the growing popularity of playing with, managing, and exchanging pictures. Literary works like Jacinto Octavio Picón’s novel Dulce y Sabrosa (Sweet and Delectable, 1891) attest to this penchant among the urban classes for diligently gathering and displaying printed images.91 The growth of a taste for collecting prints and ephemera occurred in tandem with the development of other visual practices, such as visiting art and commercial exhibitions. The printed image, however, was unique in that it was more accessible to the lower classes of society and allowed audiences to give artefacts new meaning within the space of their homes. Engravings reproduced in serialised novels grasped the reader’s attention in similar ways.92 Prints helped popularise idealised characters and romantic scenes from novels. Due to their widespread popularity these prints were soon considered vulgar among the higher echelons of society.93 In contrast to the upper-class practice of cutting and assembling printed ephemera in sumptuous albums, a common practice among the lower class was to use illustrations to improve their domestic interiors and adorn their otherwise bare walls.94 Novelist Benito Pérez Galdós took much care in describing how his protagonists interacted with printed images. When the protagonist

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

50

Madrid on the move

of Fortunata y Jacinta (1887) descends to the dwellings of the poor, we read that on the wall was ‘una especie de altarucho formado por diferente estampas, alguna lámina al cromo de prospectos o periódicos satíricos y muchas fotografía’ (a sort of makeshift altar composed of various prints, some coloured labels or satirical papers, and several photographs).95 Similarly, in La de Bringas (That Bringas Woman, 1884), one of the female protagonists shuffles through an assortment of invaluable objects that she nonetheless treasures, from perfume labels and cigarette ribbons to religious cards.96 The characters’ attitudes towards ephemeral material objects helped define them as individuals and, furthermore, commented on the emergence of new commodities and the differences between material and affective value. Even magazine editors themselves were known to collect and display printed ephemera and illustrations. Some original sketches of prints later reproduced in Madrid Cómico and Blanco y Negro survive today and show torn edges and punctured corners. The wear and tear visible on these drawings, especially those with personal dedications or sketches of women in revealing poses, suggests that they were pinned on the walls of newspaper offices.97 In a similar way, illustrators would often draw small holes or folds in the corners of pictures, playing with optical illusions meant to suggest that the pictures were hanging on a wall.98 For instance, in 1881, the political gazette El Motín experimented with a trompe l’œil by creating a collage of notes, prints, cartoons, and illustrations evoking the style of the makeshift altar that Pérez Galdós described in his novel (figure 1.7). The illustration printed in El Motín was a critique of the conservative party’s recent tenure in government under Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, which had concluded just two months earlier. The critique, however, is somewhat undermined by the attractive visual layout, which juxtaposes multiple media and artistic styles.99 Information on distribution and sales provides useful data about the circulation of newspapers and other printed media, but these accounts indicate that images were also living objects that functioned as both public cultural representations and personal items to be cherished.

City visions: picturing change, mapping movement Although later chapters in this book will focus more closely on street scenes and people’s experiences of everyday life, I turn first to images of city views, buildings, and current events. These two modes of representing and experiencing the city – the small-scale street scene and the large-scale cityscape – exist in a dialectical relationship that has been theorised by Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, who conceived of cities as dynamic spaces in perpetual movement rather than as static places. Lefebvre’s well-known argument

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Seeing in the city 51

1.7  Eduardo Sojo ‘Demócrito’, ‘El legado de los conservadores’, El Motín, 1 (10 April 1881), 2–3

that space is not an empty vacuum filled with people and things but rather a ‘living creature’ composed of changing social practices and rituals marked a turning point in methodological approaches to cities and lived experience. Similarly, de Certeau highlighted the juxtaposition between the bird’s-eye view and the daily experience of urban dwellers at ground level.100 These theorists argued that space is multilayered and that spatial practices and representations of public space are in continuous dialogue. Representations of cityscapes, constructions, and panoramic views entail a certain degree of distance and an outlook that privileged urban development. Street scenes, on the other hand, put the spotlight on spatial practices and the effect of these transformations on the daily rituals of the city’s residents. The effects of modernisation and urban change were expressed visually in illustrated print media. During the final decades of the century, Madrid was a city altered by urbanisation, renovation projects, and demographic growth. This was a time when the city revitalised its appearance as a modern metropolis, both culturally, through its printing and publishing industries, and physically, through reforms and urban design.101 The nineteenth century saw two major projects that altered the capital’s layout and social

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

52

Madrid on the move

makeup: the restructuring of the Puerta del Sol in the 1850s, and the expansion project known as the Ensanche designed by Carlos María de Castro in 1860. During the Restoration, further developments improved the city’s infrastructure, and its central areas acquired a more monumental appearance. Most importantly, the construction of the Ensanche progressed, and it gradually became an established residential district for people of means, while slums mushroomed on the city’s outskirts (the extrarradio).102 La Ilustración Española y Americana shone a spotlight on the process of urban reform and relied on both skilled artists and graphic reporters to convey an image of modern Madrid. Geared towards a privileged readership, it offered lavish illustrations and centrefolds that featured royal pageants, funerals of dignitaries, inaugurations of new railway stations and exhibition complexes, and sprawling views and panoramic vistas of the capital. These illustrations echoed current artistic trends and at the same time responded to one of the general yet crucial aims of the illustrated press across Europe and the Americas – to show readers events and places they would be otherwise unable to access. Photography had a profound impact on illustrated print culture. Its influence began well before the development of photoengraving techniques and halftone printing – a method that permitted the direct reproduction of photography with its complete tonal range. Photographic methods inspired draughtsmen to compose original visual sequences and to sketch monuments, embellishments, and city views with a newfound precision. The style and subject matter of prints also informed the objectives of photography. From the 1830s, prints and magazines like Semanario Pintoresco depicted Madrid’s prominent buildings and monuments, and this subject matter was quickly taken up by the recently created medium of photography (figure  1.8). Because photographs needed to be staged and required long exposure times until the late 1800s, still views of buildings proved ideal. In this sense, there was continuity between prints and photography.103 The two forms mutually enriched each other, and they existed in a reciprocal relationship throughout the century: if engraving informed photographers’ choice of subject matter, then, from the 1870s, photography profoundly altered how illustrated magazines pictured the modern spaces of the capital.104 As can be appreciated in two images of the 1883 Exposición de Minería – a photograph from Jean Laurent and an illustration of the same event from the front page of La Ilustración Española y Americana – photography continued print culture’s tradition of depicting imposing ­ structures while also extending the reach and aims of the press (figures 1.9 and 1.10). Laurent was a pivotal figure in Spanish photography who introduced photomechanical techniques and documented the capital’s main public spaces and monuments throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Though

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Seeing in the city 53

1.8  ‘Palacio de Buenavista’, Semanario Pintoresco Español, 8 (1 May 1836), 41

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

54

Madrid on the move

1.9  Jean Laurent y Cía, Palacio de Velázquez en el Retiro, ca. 1880–1900. Gelatin glass negative

the illustration is drawn from a slightly different angle than Laurent’s photograph, it is clearly based on the photographer’s work, and its caption reads ‘de fotografía de Laurent’ (from photograph by Laurent). This sort of caption was common in the 1880s: it enhanced the picture’s veracity (here the author’s name is not included, and the photographer receives all credit) and promoted the magazine as a modern outlet using the latest technologies.105 In this sense, representations of the city were an important conceptual link between printmaking and photography. From the 1870s, the illustrated press focused its event coverage by portraying different instances and perspectives of the same event. Vignettes were juxtaposed, zoomed in on, or overlaid on the same page in order to create simultaneous views of a single scene. Juan Comba, for instance, depicted various instances of King Alfonso XII’s return to Madrid following a visit to Aranjuez in 1885 (figure 1.11). The sequence, which is an example of the type of pageantry the magazine broadcasted, showcased different snapshots of the event with viewpoints – including a cropped image of the Royal Palace – inspired by photography. The illustration’s description noted that the artist had drawn from nature and had ‘fotografiado la crónica de los hechos’ (photographed the chronicle of the events).106 Comba tried to

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Seeing in the city 55

1.10  ‘La Exposición de Minería. Parque de Madrid – Exterior del Pabellón Central (De fotografía de Laurent)’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 21 (8 June 1883), 1

convey a sense of movement and participation by concentrating on the king’s journey, which he achieved by juxtaposing several pictures and highlighting the capital’s infrastructure and public spaces and the press industry itself, as evidenced in both the text and the upper-left vignette. Photography and illustration mutually served one another. Comba emulated photography’s precision and at the same time relied on his skills as a draughtsman to capture a sense of movement in these compact sketches. Clear precursors to photo reportage and the inventive designs introduced by rotogravure in the early twentieth century, these layouts are indicative of people’s readiness to engage with and interpret this kind of visual narrative.107 In the same way that early picturesque magazines introduced the readership to the interpretive possibilities of viewing words and images together, photography allowed for new experiments in the sequencing of images and perspectives. After all, audiences – who had begun collecting images and printed ephemera in their private lives – were becoming a­ ccustomed to these sorts of ­compositions and associations between images.

Madrid on the move

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

56

1.11  Juan Comba, ‘Viaje del S.M. el Rey a Aranjuez’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 25 (8 July 1885), 4



Seeing in the city 57

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Key to the development of these innovative layouts was the professionalisation of the press industry in the 1870s. Staff draughtsmen like Manuel Alcázar and Juan Comba travelled to specific locations to witness events first-hand and record them in their illustrations. Comba covered numerous sites and events related to the royal family throughout the 1870s and 1880s and received the honorary title Caballero de la Real Orden de Carlos III in 1879.108 Similarly, Josep Lluís (José Luis) Pellicer and Tomás Padró accompanied Amadeo de Saboya and Alfonso XII respectively during their travels and military forays.109 In these illustrations, the king was both the main character and an observer, a tourist of sorts, engaging with his surroundings and participating in a new visual experience.110 These illustrations were not only meant to convey and promote public display and pageantry; they also drew readers’ attention to the act of observation itself and invited them to take part in the event being represented. From the early days of the picture press, events and incidents – like the infant’s funeral or the king’s visit – were easily recognised as such. These events were normalised through their visual representations, which shaped perceptions of public life and collective identities.111 In looking at these visual representations, some scholars highlight the connection with the spectator and a sentiment of belonging and identity achieved through propaganda, while others stress the perceptive schema of the viewer and changing notions of space.112 Overall, these depictions conveyed a notion of progress based on urban regeneration that concomitantly promoted the idea of a well-organised city with instances of pomp and spectacle. The way in which events and public space were presented not only indicates the showmanship linked to urban authorities, it also reveals changing attitudes towards space and vision. As evidenced in Comba’s illustrations of the king’s visit (see figure 1.11), the event in question is pushed to the background by imposing views of monuments, overwhelmingly compact scenes, large crowds, the expectation linked to a public event, and the contrast between empty space and movement. Depictions of events signal how perceptions of relevance, time, and immediacy were shaped through illustrated print culture. It was not only ceremonies of pomp and circumstance that captured audiences’ and editors’ attention. From the early days of illustrated journalism and popular lithography, anecdotal instances of everyday life, such as the momentary action of waiting for or boarding an omnibus, also received attention.113 Urbanisation thus introduced new themes that found their ideal vehicle of communication in popular print culture. The depiction of fleeting moments suggests the elevation of everyday life to a category of artistic and literary analysis – a trait that would also come to characterise the sketches of mores and the realist and impressionist movements. Baudelaire famously wrote

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

58

Madrid on the move

that ‘however much we may love general beauty, as it is expressed by classical poets and artists, we are no less wrong to neglect particular beauty, the beauty of circumstance and the sketch of manners’.114 His observation echoed a growing interest in the categories of time and circumstance. While representations of grandiose events privileged monumental views, they also introduced ephemeral instances of urban life. Comba’s rendering of the king’s trip was made relevant thanks to its capturing of ephemeral moments: a street vendor selling the latest news, groups of people casually talking or witness the happenings, and the king descending from the train (a reminder that the Madrid–Aranjuez route was the capital’s first train line). Two nineteenth-century illustrations of the Puerta del Sol, Madrid’s main square, show how notions of space, immediacy, and vision shifted over the latter half of the century. The first, dating from 1871 (figure 1.12) was published under the title ‘Vista general de la Puerta del Sol’ (General view of the Puerta del Sol), along with an article by the urban reformer and chronicler Ramón de Mesonero Romanos. Rooted in the panoptic ideology of the eighteenth century, the panoramic view was a common trope in nineteenth-century literature and was meant to educate residents and help them understand the changing urban landscape.115 Mesonero Romanos was

1.12  Francisco Hernández Tomé, ‘Madrid – Vista general de la Puerta del Sol (dibujo del Señor Tomé’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, supplement no. 1 (5 January 1871), 20–1



Seeing in the city 59

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

a prolific writer of costumbrista essays and guidebooks, and he was one of the capital’s most renowned city chroniclers of the mid-nineteenth century. During the 1840s and 1850s, Mesonero Romanos envisioned a number of enhancements for the capital, giving detailed accounts of its streets and appearance in his guidebooks or manuales, and between 1845 and 1850 he played an active role in the municipality, serving on its council.116 In his role as an urban planner, he also acknowledged that words were not enough to explain his urban renewal projects. Instead, what was required was a visual approach that combined images and words.117 In 1844, more than twenty-five years before this image was published, Mesonero Romanos wrote that he was disappointed that the Spanish capital did not boast a central church. Madrid would not become a diocese until 1885, at which point a large-scale project for the Almudena Cathedral was finally approved. One could argue that Mesonero’s frustration was not a matter of religious devotion; rather, he lamented the absence of an elevated place from where to savour ‘a bird’s-eye view of the entire surface of the capital’.118 With the article that he wrote to accompany the 1871 image of the Puerta del Sol, Mesonero transmitted an enthusiasm that echoes his lifelong commitment to recording and improving the capital – a commitment that would remain until 1876 when he declared farewell, professing that he no longer had the qualities needed to describe the changing face of the capital.119 The 1871 ‘Vista general’ was not only a sweeping panoramic view; it integrated a number of components related to urban renovation including gas lighting, trams, advertisements, a water fountain, and the clock tower crowning the Casa de Correos (inaugurated in 1866). In his text, Mesonero praised the fresh appearance of the newly remodelled square following the conclusion of construction work in 1862. This idea was accentuated by the visual impact of the double-page centrefold, which, according to Mesonero, was possibly the largest print ever published in Spain. The illustration’s creator, Francisco Hernández Tomé, a painter and muralist, contributed to other illustrated publications of the mid-nineteenth century, including the Semanario Pintoresco and the mammoth Diccionario geográfico-estadístico-histórico de España y sus posesiones de Ultramar (Geographic-statistical-historical dictionary of Spain and its overseas possessions, 1846–50), known as the Diccionario Madoz. Interestingly, Tomé specialised in monumental perspectives and elevated views, albeit of temple interiors. For this illustration he was probably inspired by a photograph by Jean Laurent that dated from around 1870 and was printed under the same title (figure 1.13). Even though the magazine makes no mention of Laurent and the label ‘de fotografía’ did not come into usage until the following decade, when innovative intaglio techniques permitted direct copies of

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

60

Madrid on the move

1.13  Jean Laurent y Cía, Madrid. Vista general de la puerta del Sol, ca. 1860–70. Photograph, albumen print on paper

­ hotographic originals, it seems almost certain that the artist used Laurent’s p photograph to capture the view of the square on paper. In the accompanying article, Mesonero noted that if the Puerta del Sol had formerly been the nucleus of the ‘antigua villa’ (old town), it could now claim to be an outstanding centre of a modern city as well as a historical and topographic bond between the city’s old and new parts. The renovation of the city’s hub responded to common concerns of the period about urbanisation, circulation, health conditions, and overcrowding. These kinds of renovations were a battleground for administrative, urban, and social authorities. For instance, Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, executed between 1853 and 1870, responded to similar concerns and aimed to clear out and open up the city, as did London’s ongoing projects of urban regeneration during the Victorian era. Haussmann’s aim for Paris had been not only to facilitate movement and establish new spaces of sociability but to create sweeping and climatic vistas that would turn the city into a visual spectacle.120 Mesonero’s article referred to the way that the processes of demolition and construction were unfolding across the globe and observed that the Puerta del Sol had gone from being a humble trapezoid-shaped space to an ‘espaciosa encrucijada’ (spacious crossroads) that did not pale in comparison to ‘los animados boulevares parisienses o en las solitarias

Seeing in the city 61



Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

ásperas cordilleras de los Andes, en las ruinas de Roma o en las nebulsos márgenes del Támesis’ (the animated boulevards of Paris or the solitary rugged Andes mountains, the ruins of Rome or the foggy banks of the Thames).121 Mesonero stressed concepts like vision and space, using the word space four times and further emphasising it with italics. He defined such abstract ideas like space, seeing, and progress in relation to urban developments occurring in other European cities. The second notable illustration of the Puerta del Sol, this one from 1884, shows a different view of the square and was inspired by a different photograph by Laurent (figure 1.14). Once again, the illustration represents a spacious square and conveys an imposing sense of space and movement. At the same time, it incorporates elements identified with modernisation, such as trams, carriages, shop fronts, and advertisements, all of which are more conspicuous here than in Tomé’s ‘Vista general’. What is significant in this picture is the central role observation acquires. Although the main subject of Laurent’s related photograph is the funeral of an important religious figure, Cardinal Moreno, the funeral procession fades into the background of the illustration’s sweeping panorama, in contrast to the more conventional

1.14  ‘Funerales del Excelentísimo Sr. Cardenal Moreno: Paso del cortejo fúnebre por la Puerta del Sol – (de fotografía de Laurent)’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 3 (8 September 1884), 137

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

62

Madrid on the move

depiction of the cardinal’s casket that was printed on the opposite page of the magazine. Here the event at hand is diminished, and the reader’s eyes are instantly attracted to the sweeping cityscape and the crowds rushing towards the square to catch a view. Laurent’s photographs of monuments and city views did not feature the human figures and crowds of people that illustrators typically pencilled in. It was a common practice among graphic artists across Europe to alter details of the original photographs and to add elements that contributed to the urban landscape, like human figures and trams. This practice responded to two main objectives that may seem contradictory but were in fact complementary: people both domesticated monumental views and enhanced their realism.122 On the one hand, the inclusion of humans made the public space into something more intimate and familiar, a space that audiences could relate to, all the more so because the street scene was an established component of the deep-rooted tradition of costumbrismo. On the other hand, paradoxically, modifying the original photograph and adding human figures enhanced the image’s realism by giving the illustration a sense of vitality and contemporaneity that could not be matched by a photograph of a static vista. The central theme of the 1884 illustration of the Puerta del Sol was not the funeral procession but vision itself and the way in which urban spectators observed the event from multiple standpoints, from balconies, from moving trams, from the street, or even through an advertisement for a photography studio. These illustrations of the Puerta del Sol appeared in other printed media. A common convention of the period was to include prints of monuments and city views in guidebooks, in encyclopaedias like the Diccionario Madoz, and alongside cartographic maps – a technique that built on the long-standing tradition of featuring snippets of architectural details in maps, a tradition that dated to the early modern era. Because the readership was conversant with these sorts of prints and their commercial success had been demonstrated, publishers advertised that their books included prints in order to boost their sales. Guidebooks highlighted the number of engravings they carried on the front cover or title page. For example, the subtitle of Ángel Fernández de los Ríos’s Guía de Madrid (Guide to Madrid, 1876) boasted that it contained over 130 city views and engravings, ten black-andwhite and three colour maps. One of these prints was a full-page reproduction of Tomé’s ‘Vista general de la Puerta del Sol’. These prints could be collected by readers and were also reproduced in the illustrated press, thus signalling the fluidity that existed between different printed formats and the way in which consumers’ penchant for illustrations altered the publishing industry.123 In the mid-1880s, Tomés’s ‘Vista general’ was reproduced in yet another guidebook and featured on the top left corner of a map ­executed

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Seeing in the city 63

1.15  Emilio Valverde y Álvarez, Plano de Madrid, ca. 1880–89. Map, 70 × 60 cm. (Madrid: Lit. A. Fortuny)

by the writer and urban cartographer Emilio Valverde (figure 1.15). These illustrations moved beyond the originally intended medium, and the pairing of city views with other printed documents, like maps or travel literature, allowed audiences to draw new associations between public space and printed images. This focus on panoramic views responded to a general interest in recording change, mapping space, and formulating the principles of the nineteenth-century city. A national registry of property, created in the early

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

64

Madrid on the move

nineteenth century, attests to changes in the conceptualisation of land, with graphic representations replacing written descriptions.124 Describing space, movement, and the changing dynamics of the city was a fundamental concern for Spanish urban planners and chroniclers, and illustrations were key in making these changes legible and articulating future designs. In Spain, this process gained momentum from the late 1860s when fledgling projects of urban expansion in Madrid and Barcelona began to materialise. Movement and circulation were at the core of Spanish urban projects, which, in line with Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, were intended to improve living conditions by accommodating a growing population. In his massive two-volume treatise Teoría general de la urbanización (General theory of urbanisation, 1867), the Catalan urban planner Ildefonso Cerdà used a single word to sum up his understanding of the past in light of recent improvements in urban planning: immobile. In his view, movement and locomotive transportation had changed the face of cities forever in an inescapable process of modernisation to which all Spanish cities would eventually yield.125 Movement and circulation became essential components of the urban landscape, especially in public narratives focusing on middleclass spaces. For example, Emilio Valverde, incorporated the concept of movement in his guidebook of Madrid because he believed it to be the natural element of present-day cities. To him, the Puerta del Sol epitomised movement and circulation thanks to its tramway, omnibus system, and carriages.126 The concept of movement was also a trope used by editors to describe change and urban life. A brief piece entitled ‘Nueva York – Movimiento en el “Broadway”’, published in 1875 in La Ilustración Española y Americana, describes the municipal measures implemented in New York to improve Broadway in terms of movement, display, and spectatorship.127 The author turns to a word that had only recently been introduced to the Spanish language to represent the street: ‘un kaleidoscopio [sic] (digámoslo así)’ (a kaleidoscope [let’s put it that way]) of goods, advertisements, and people of multiple races speaking different languages. These elements were becoming synonymous with a general idea of modernisation among the urban middle and upper classes. The article concluded by praising New York’s urban policing measures, which had led to safer streets for pedestrians, and contemplated the prospect of applying similar standards to Madrid’s main thoroughfares, Calle de Alcalá and the Paseo del Prado. The link to the Spanish capital was further emphasised by the two-page illustration’s title, which was possibly borrowed from a North American periodical: ‘Estados Unidos – Tipos y costumbres populares’ (United States – Popular types and customs) (figure 1.16). While the illustration’s aesthetic style and composition varied somewhat from La Ilustración Española y Americana’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Seeing in the city 65

1.16  ‘Estados Unidos – Tipos y costumbres populares. Nueva York – Movimiento en el “Broadway”’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 8 (28 February 1875), 136–7

t­rademark style, the caption bound the print to Spain’s social types and customs and transposed its common tropes to the streets of New York. Looking at a print of New York from a sitting room in Madrid, the reader could contemplate the global and local implications of the increasingly entangled process of urbanisation. During the final decades of the century, publishers updated maps and guidebooks with the aim of informing readers of recent urban developments. Although maps require of their readers a different set of skills, these guidebooks, too, aimed to capture ideas of flow and movement in a graphic format. Mapmakers not only expressed changes in the city’s topography but also devised new ways of explaining urban transformation and its effects on the spatial practices of the city’s residents. Studies of the landscape, after all – whether built, visual, verbal, or cartographic – contribute to shaping the meanings of a place.128 Between 1866 and 1880, José Pilar Morales reviewed and updated five editions of his map Plano de Madrid (Map of Madrid). In the guide accompanying the 1880 map, the author highlighted the enthusiasm that had greeted previous editions. In what was admittedly an act of self-promotion, Morales drew attention to the fact that the first edition was produced in what he deemed to be a remote period for the capital, in which it was just beginning to show signs of improvement. He stressed the new and revised edition’s thoroughness – it included all the

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

66

Madrid on the move

recent renovations – and concluded by stating that he intended to continue upgrading the guidebook.129 This wish reflects both a recognition of the sales opportunity offered by updated guidebooks and an interest in expressing spatial change in simple terms that could be apprehended at a single glance – albeit from a reader with both a basic understanding of maps and knowledge of previous transformation. Maps and city views represented urban transformation and provided information that made the city easier to navigate. In the foundational work The Production of Space, urban theorist Henri Lefebvre distinguishes between perceived, conceived, and lived space. He links perceived space to representations of city spaces designed by urban technocrats.130 While these representations can impose ideas of modernisation on a city’s residents, Lefebvre suggests that planned space and individual spatial practices are equally modelled by the imagination. Similarly, Michel de Certeau stresses that in everyday life citizens can passively resist signs or imposed routes, reappropriating them and assigning city spaces with new meanings.131 Representations of city space – like the views, vistas, and maps studied here  – show how the interplay between imagination, representation, and lived experience operate in daily life. Visual recollection also played a fundamental role in shaping perceptions of public space and urban change in this era. The sprawling views of Madrid’s landscape and maps responded to a visual culture focused on technologies of seeing and middle-class mentalities preoccupied with progress. However, prints of monuments dating back to the 1830s and 1840s and subsequently reprised by photographers from the 1850s acted as a point of recall for readers when they encountered depictions of modern cityscapes in late-century illustrated magazines. From their very origins, maps and city views have had a strong association with emotion and memory. Even in the sixteenth century, maps ‘could not speak for themselves’, and their accuracy depended not only on what physical elements were represented on their surface but on whether these elements tapped in to and could be named in memory.132 Identifying and marking land by reference to local memory was a practice that continued until the late nineteenth century.133 What is more, as argued by Giuliana Bruno, a practice of overlapping maps and various aerial views was grounded in an even earlier tradition of ‘spatial storytelling’ dating back to the early 1700s.134 Early prints of Madrid – including one authored by German mapmaker Johann Homann (ca. 1735), which shows a cartographic map of Madrid and four bird’s-eye views of the city and its monuments – bear a clear resemblance to the sequences articulated in nineteenth-century guidebooks, such as for example the images accompanying Fernández de los Ríos’s Guía de Madrid, or Valverde’s panoramic map (see figure 1.15).135 Thus, while maps could

Seeing in the city 67



Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

explain shifts in urban layout, audiences relied on these maps’ coupling with images and texts to recollect what places represented. Nineteenth-century urbanisation, printing methods, and middle-class consumerism revitalised mapmaking. Editors created a market for audiences wanting to visualise change and remain current. At the same time, guidebooks provided new forms of visual and spatial storytelling. An example can be seen in Morales’s 1880 edition of partial maps of Madrid’s third district, which corresponded to the Puerta del Sol and its surroundings. Ten maps of the neighbourhood were gathered in this pocket-sized book, each detailing different clusters of streets (figure 1.17). Printed on the opposite side of each map was a one-page advertisement, offering products from chocolate and wine to medicinal and beauty items. In reading landscapes, we must consider ‘the inherent instability of meaning, our ability to invert signs and symbols, to recycle them in a different context and thus transform their reference’.136 Although these advertisements were intended to publicise businesses and cover publishing costs, they operated

1.17  José Pilar Morales, Planos parciales de los barrios que comprende cada uno de los distritos de Madrid con las reformas de la población hechas hasta el día y otros datos estadísticos interesantes trazados con arreglo á [sic] la última demarcación oficial del Excmo. Ayuntamiento. Tercer distrito Centro (Madrid, 1880), 22–3. Map

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

68

Madrid on the move

beyond their initial purpose. They represent a mode of visual storytelling that allowed viewers to associate specific streets with businesses like the Compañía Colonial and its trademark chocolate; or to resist these associations and create new associations between place, memory, leisure. Overall, updated editions of guidebooks and maps showed that space was unstable and in continuous flux. This chapter has shown the ways in which illustrated print culture in Madrid became increasingly preoccupied with vision. The widespread use of images was connected to cultural practices of seeing, representing, and consuming. Nineteenth-century audiences needed new skills of visual imagination, literacy, and memory to successfully navigate the city and engage with its visual culture. The multiplicity of visual stimuli, printed media, and visual-focused forms of recreation educated the gaze and shaped visually initiated citizens across the West. At the same time, audiences managed, collected, and manipulated different forms of printed media, which acted as artefacts that could be touched and cultural representations that could be appropriated. Cultural producers attempted to find adequate ways to strike and speak to the eyes of the reader. Spanish illustrated print culture was a fertile ground for experimentation that allowed for cross-connections with European and North American periodicals as well as other visual and literary media. This cross-fertilisation, too, was crucial in shaping the nineteenth-century gaze. There were several points of continuity between the past and the present, between previous attitudes towards seeing and contemporary concerns regarding urban spectatorship, as the trope of the blind man attests. These continuities open the path to reformulating apparently outmoded conventions within a more far-reaching, global context in which the mechanisms of the gaze and patterns of memory were essential driving forces. In what follows, we will look more closely at how specific definitions of the modern were negotiated and constructed in relation to an increasingly interconnected world system.

Notes 1 Schwartz and Pryzblyski, The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, 165. 2 Ortega, Ojos que ven, esp. 11. The reign of Isabel II spanned from 1833 to the 1868 Revolution, which opened the period known as the Sexenio Democrático. This latter period lasted until the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1874. 3 Pedro Navascués, ‘Madrid, ciudad y arquitectura (1808–1898)’, in Antonio Fernández García (ed.), Historia de Madrid (Madrid: Editorial



Seeing in the city 69

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Complutense, 1994), 401. Projects of construction and remodelling included: the train stations of Delicias (1878–80), del Norte (1876, 1881–82), Biblioteca Nacional (1866–92); the remodelling of Retiro (1870s–1880s); religious constructions such as Iglesia de la Santa Cruz (1889), Las salesas (1880), and Catedral de la Almudena (1883–1911); Banco de España (1884); Bolsa de Comercio (1885); and palaces including Duquesa de Medina de las Torres (1881–84). On exhibition complexes, see n. 81 in this chapter. 4 This data is from Ángel Bahamonde Magro and Antonio Fernández García, ‘La sociedad madrileña en el siglo XIX’, in Fernández García (ed.), Historia de Madrid, 479. 5 Pedro Navascués notes that a long period of stability is needed for projects to be completed: ‘Madrid, ciudad y arquitectura’, 399. Jorge Uría argues that despite being a period of political conservatism, the Restoration had sufficient stability for social and cultural practices to advance on several levels, such as the cultural representations created for the consumption and entertainment of a growing middle class: La España liberal (1868–1917): Cultura y vida cotidiana (Madrid: Síntesis, 2008), 9–10, 386. 6 Jesusa Vega, ‘De la estampa a la fotografía: El traje regional y el simulacro de España’, in Carmen Ortiz García, Cristina Sánchez-Carretero, and Antonio Cea Gutiérrez (eds.), Maneras de mirar: Lecturas antropológicas de la fotografía (Madrid: CSIC, 2005), 70. 7 Martina Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth Century: European Journalism and its ‘Physiologies’, 1830–50 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 23. 8 On the subject of observation and technological innovations between 1800 and 1850, see Crary, Techniques of the Observer. 9 On this subject see, Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth Century, 59–74; Dorde Cuvardic García, ‘El punto de vista panorámico en la literatura europea decimonónica’, Filología y Lingüística, 32:1 (2006), 37–50. Attention to vision was not exclusive to romantic literature. The realist author Benito Pérez Galdós, for instance, also relied on ‘visualisation and the invitation to see’: David R. George Jr., ‘Foresight, blindness or illusion? Women and citizenship in the second series of Galdós’s Episodios nacionales’, in Larson and Woods (eds.), Visualizing Spanish Modernity, 46. 10 For a discussion of optical technologies in Spain, see Bernardo Riego, ‘Visibilidades diferenciadas: Usos sociales de las imágenes en la España Isabelina’, in Ortega (ed.), Ojos que ven, 57–76. 11 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 3–5, 17. Also see Larson’s reading of Crary in ‘Stages of modernity’, 264–5. 12 See Louis Huart, Physiologie du flâneur (Paris: Aubert et Lavigne, 1841). The history of the flâneur is treated in chapter 3 of this book. 13 In Victorian culture, for instance, blindness provided a crucial trope through which to explore visual experience. See Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 64. 14 Costumbrismo, memory, and depictions of street types are the subjects of chapters 4 and 5 of this book. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

70

Madrid on the move

Poor (London: Charles Griffin, 1861), vol. 4, 433–4; Antonio Ferrer del Río and Juan Pérez Calvo, ‘El ciego’, in Los españoles pintados por sí mismos (Madrid: I Boix, 1843–44), vol. 2, 472–82. On the blind man in Victorian visual culture and literature, see Nead, Victorian Babylon, 59–62; and Daniel Pick, ‘Stories of the Eye’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), 186–99. 15 On the subject of blindness and sight in Spanish costumbrista and realist literature, see Vernon Chamberlin, ‘The ciego in the novels of Galdós: Costumbrismo, realism, symbolism’, Decimonónica, 3:2 (Summer 2006), 1–26; and George, ‘Foresight, blindness or illusion?’, 46–63. 16 Nead, Victorian Babylon, 59. 17 Ferrer del Río and Pérez Calvo, ‘El ciego’, 482. Italics in the original. Leonardo Alenza was the author of the illustration opening the chapter devoted to el ciego. 18 Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, 2. On the relationship between internal mental images and material, physical images, see Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), esp. 2–5. 19 Riego, La construcción social, 369–71. 20 Rebecca Haidt observes that there was a collective memory around saints’ lives and biblical episodes and that previous forms of oral and visual culture paved the way for the communicative mechanisms of the press: ‘Commodifying place and time: Photography, memory, and media cultures around 1850’, Hispanic Issues Online Debates, 3 (Spring 2011), 14. 21 Julio Caro Baroja (ed.), Romances de ciego (Madrid: Taurus, 1966), 13. 22 Antonio Flores, ‘La privanza en 1850’, in Flores, Ayer, hoy y mañana, o La fe, el vapor y la electricidad: Cuadros sociales de 1800, 1850 y 1899 (Madrid: Mellado, 1863), vol. 2, 328. 23 Pla Vivas, La ilustración gráfica, 188–9. 24 David Henkin, ‘Word on the streets. Ephemeral signage in antebellum New York’, in Schwartz and Przyblyski (eds.), The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, 194. 25 Antonio Flores, ‘Los gritos de Madrid’, in Flores, Ayer, hoy y mañana, vol. 2, 23, 21. 26 See, for example, Frances Sargent Locke Osgood, The Cries of New York (New York: John Doggett, 1846). On the subject of the street cry in British visual culture, see Sean Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002). 27 ‘Los vendedores de Madrid’, Museo de las Familias (25 December 1848), 273–7. The artist Francisco Ortego drew a series entitled ‘Comercio ambulante de Madrid’ (Street trade in Madrid), which was published in the illustrated paper El Museo Universal between 1857 and 1869. 28 Simmel, ‘The metropolis and mental life’, 175. 29 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 11. 30 Hill and Schwartz, Getting the Picture, 5.



Seeing in the city 71

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

31 Cecilio Alonso, ‘Difusión de las ilustraciones en España’, in La prensa ilustrada en España: Las ilustraciones, 1850–1920 (Montpellier: IRIS. Université Paul Valéry, 1996), 49–54. For an overview of the illustrated press in Spain, see Sánchez Vigil, Revistas ilustradas en España. 32 Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth Century, 35–7. On this subject, also see Mainardi, Another World. 33 Kevin G. Barhurst and John Nerone, ‘Civic picturing vs. realist photojournalism: The regime of illustrated news, 1856–1901’, Design Issues, 16:1 (Spring 2000), 60, qtd. in Haidt, ‘Commodifying place and time’, 13. 34 Marta Palenque, ‘La Ilustración Española y Americana, una ventana abierta a la cultura dominante en España entre 1869 y 1905’, in Marta Giné, Marta Palenque, and José M. Goñi (eds.), La recepción de la cultura extranjera en La  Ilustración Española y Americana (1869–1905) (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013), 12. 35 Pedro de Madrazo, ‘Los periódicos ilustrados de Madrid’, IEA, 1 (8 January 1882), 7, 10–11, 13–14. 36 Pedro Gómez Aparicio, Historia del periodismo español. De la revolución de septiembre al desastre colonial (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1971). 37 Botrel, ‘La construcción’, 22–3. Jean-François Botrel observes that this increase was most significant between 1870 and 1920, when the number of periodical publications increased from 450 to 2300. Charnon-Deutsch also locates this move towards mass media in the late 1890s. She notes that, while the transition was slower in Spain than in other industrial countries, from 1879 to 1900, the press set the groundwork for this shift from 1879 to 1900; see Hold That Pose, 84, 147. 38 Jesús A. Martínez Martín, ‘La cultura en el siglo XIX’, in Fernández García (ed.), Historia de Madrid, 557–8. On this subject also see Martínez Martín, ‘Madrid, 1900. La configuración de una industria cultural’, Arbor, 666 (June 2001), 565–6. 39 Botrel, ‘La construcción’, 22. Botrel places illiteracy in Spain at roughly 55 per cent at the turn of the century. 40 Ibid., 24. 41 The law was passed on 26 July 1883 and eliminated obstacles that had hindered the creation of new periodicals: the required payment of 400 pesetas as a subsidy, a waiting period of twenty days for publications to be authorized, and necessary prepress review processes. See Joan Oleza Simó et al., ‘Donde se demuestra que la investigación es cosa de locos. Clarín y su paraíso sin manzanas’, in Líneas actuales de investigación literaria: Estudios de literatura hispánica (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2004), 34n5. 42 Versteeg, Jornaleros de la pluma, 61. For a complete list of the satirical magazines founded between 1735 and 1995, as well as their founders, cartoonists, and contributors, see José María López Ruiz, La vida alegre. Historia de las revistas humorísticas, festivas y satíricas publicadas en la villa y corte de Madrid (Madrid: Compañía literaria, 1995), 292–342. 43 Charnon-Deutsch, Hold That Pose, 86.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

72

Madrid on the move

44 Sánchez Vigil, Revistas ilustradas en España, 22–3. Also see Jean-François Botrel, ‘Estadística de la prensa madrileña de 1858 a 1909 según el Registro de Contribución Industrial’, in Manuel Tuñón de Lara, Antonio Elorza, and Manuel Pérez Ledesma (eds.), Prensa y sociedad en España (1820–1936) (Madrid: Edicusa, 1975), 25–46. 45 Carlos Reyero, ‘Más allá de Francia. Las ilustraciones de pintura contemporánea extranjera’, in Giné, Palenque, and Goñi (eds.), La recepción, 254. According to Henriette Partzsch, in the 1860s, the practice of importing specialized prints was prevalent in the Spanish female fashion magazine La Moda Elegante. This magazine established close ties with the French publication La Mode Illustrée and even reproduced entire sections from its French counterpart. ‘“Venid, elegantes”: Seducción, información y control en las crónicas de modas españolas durantes los años 1860’, in Yvette Bürki and Henriette Partzsch (eds.), Redes de comunicación: Estudios sobre la prensa en el mundo hispanohablante (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2016), 284. 46 Sánchez Vigil, Revistas ilustradas en España, 54. 47 Jean-François Botrel, ‘Imágenes sin fronteras: El comercio europeo de las ilustraciones’, in Borja Rodríguez Gutiérrez and Raquel Gutiérrez Sebastián (eds.), Literatura ilustrada decimonónica, 57 perspectivas (Santander: PubliCan, 2011), 129–32. Botrel explores the commercial exchange of illustrations between editors of Madrid and Barcelona and the French editorial houses Hachette and Hetzel. 48 ‘Variedades’, La Ilustración [Barcelona], 10 (9 January 1881), 74–5. 49 Eusebio Martínez de Velasco, ‘Nuestros grabados’, IEA, 21 (8 June 1876), 371. 50 ‘An eminent Spanish publisher’, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1492 (26 April 1884), 157. 51 See figure 5.8. 52 ‘The Pictorial Spirit of the European Illustrated Press’, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1040 (4 September 1875), 447. 53 ‘The Pictorial Spirit of the European Illustrated Press’, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1014 (6 March 1875), 420; and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1167 (9 February 1878), 387. 54 ‘Costumbres populares de Lisboa’, La Ilustración de Madrid, 39 (15 August 1871), 240. 55 See, for example, ‘Nueva-York – Movimiento en el “Broadway”’, IEA, 28 February 1875, 131; ‘La verdad en su lugar’, IEA, 25 (5 September 1871), 431. 56 Fernando Corradi, Diario de las sesiones de cortes. Senado, 146 (5 July 1883), 2194. 57 Henriette Partzsch, ‘How to be a cultural entrepreneur’, in Andrew Ginger and Geraldine Lawless (eds.), Spain in the Nineteenth Century: New Essays on Experiences of Culture and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 199–200. 58 This argument has been made by Richard Drayton and David Motadel in relation to globalisation studies; see ‘Discussion: The futures of global ­ history’, 10.



Seeing in the city 73

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

59 José María Desantes Guanter, Fundamentos del derecho de la información (Madrid: Confederación Española de Cajas de Ahorros, 1977), 69, qtd. in Carlos Soria, ‘La ley española de Policía de Imprenta de 1883’, Documentación de las ciencias de la información (Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1982), vol. 6, 32. 60 Francisco de Asís Pacheco, ‘La legislación sobre la prensa. El proyecto de Ley de Policía de Imprenta’, Revista General de Legislación y Jurisprudencia 62 (Madrid: Imprenta de la revista de legislación, 1883), 184. 61 Diario de las sesiones de Cortes. Congreso de los diputados 88 (16 April 1893), 1998. On the distribution and exchange of banned publications and images in the mid-1800s, see Isabel Burdiel, ‘Los Borbones en pelota: la pornografía política en la crisis del reinado isabelino’, in Isabel Burdiel (ed.), Los Borbones en pelota. (Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2012), 47. 62 León Roch (pseud. of Francisco Pérez Mateos), 75 años de periodismo con motivo de las bodas de diamante de “La Época” (Madrid: Ramona Velasco, 1923), 254. 63 ‘Notre But’, in L’Illustration 1 (4 March 1843). For the Spanish translation and additional commentary, see Riego, La construcción social, 153–6. 64 Ángel Fernández de los Ríos, ‘Anales ilustrados de la Guerra en Oriente’, Semanario Pintoresco Español, 18 (30 April 1854), 144. 65 Pla Vivas, La ilustración gráfica, 105–6. 66 Hill and Schwartz, Getting the Picture, 5. 67 See, for example, ‘La verdad en su lugar’, IEA, 25 (5 September 1871), 431. The relationship between veracity, representation, and information is discussed in chapter 5. 68 Fernández de los Ríos, ‘Anales ilustrados’, 144. 69 ‘Speaking to the Eye’ (from the Economist), Illustrated London News, 487 (24 May 1851), 452. This article is partially reproduced in Nead, Victorian Babylon, 57, along with her insightful analysis on this piece. 70 ‘El arte y la industria’, El Museo Universal, 1 (15 January 1857), 2–3; signed D.S.P. in the table of contents and F.P. below the article. On the confrontation between supporters of technological advance and those who believed in the artistic and antiutilitarian qualities of literature, see Lee Fontanella, La imprenta y las letras en la España romántica (Bern: Peter Lang, 1982), 12–14. 71 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (London: Smith, Elder, 1853), 171. On these statements by Bécquer, see Vega, ‘De la estampa a la fotografía’, 71. 72 Lou Charnon-Deutsch, ‘From engraving to photo: Cross-cut technologies in the Spanish illustrated press’, in Larson and Woods (eds.), Visualizing Spanish Modernity, 179. 73 ‘A scene in Shantytown, New York. Reproduction direct from nature’, Daily Graphic, 4 March 1880. On the introduction of photoengraving in Spain, see Sánchez Vigil, Revistas ilustradas en España, 78–83. 74 Sánchez Vigil, Revistas ilustradas en España, 54. 75 ‘El arte y la industria’, 3 (emphasis in the original). 76 Nead, Victorian Babylon, 57.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

74

Madrid on the move

77 Adolphe-Martial Potément, known as Martial, Headquarters of the Société des Aquafortistes, 1864. Etching. (Metropolitan Museum of Art). 78 ‘Una esquina de Madrid el 10 de julio’, La Ilustración [Madrid], 21 August 1854; El Solfeo, 90 (29 November 1875). 79 Miguel B. Márquez, ‘Abelardo de Carlos y La Ilustración Española y Americana’, Ámbitos, 13–14 (2005), 196n28. 80 See, for example, James Gillray, Very Slippy Weather, 1808; Theodore Lane, Honi. Soit. Qui. Mal. Y. Pense, 1821; C. J. Traviès, ‘Aubert Éditeur’, La Caricature, 22 December 1831. On this subject, see Mark Bills, The Art of Satire: London in Caricature (London: Philip Wilson, 2006), 27–31. 81 The first industrial exhibition was celebrated in Madrid in 1827, with others following in 1828, 1831, 1841, and 1845. See Ángel Fernández de los Ríos, Guía de Madrid (1876; Madrid, La Librería, 2002), 638–9. Wine and commercial exhibitions were held in Madrid in 1877, but it was not until the 1880s that these exhibitions increased significantly in number, coinciding with the construction of the Palacio de Cristal (1877), as well as the Palacio de la Exposición de Bellas Artes, which was built during the Exposición Nacional de la Industria y de las Artes (1881). Several illustrations in La Ilustración Española y Americana depicted these exhibitions, their visitors, and the products on display. Some examples include: ‘Interior de la Exposición Comercial inaugurada en 27 de enero último – (calle de Espoz y Mina, núm. 6)’, IEA, 7 (22 February 1877); José Ruidavets, ‘Parque de Madrid – Instalaciones en la exposición de plantas y flores’, IEA, 23 (23 June 1890); and Cecilio Pla, ‘Apuntes de la exposición del “Círculo de Bellas Artes”’, IEA, 21 (8 June 1889). 82 Benito Pérez Galdós, La desheredada (Madrid: Imprenta de La Guirnalda, 1881), 295. 83 Luis Sazatornil Ruiz, ‘Las ciudades de la memoria y el moderno espectador: De las exposiciones universales al touriste’, in José Manuel Iglesias Gil (ed.), Cursos sobre el Patrimonio Histórico (Santander: Universidad de Cantabria, 2004), vol. 8, 49. 84 The expression ‘visual anchor’ is from Charnon-Deutsch, Fictions of the Feminine, 129, 268. 85 Carlos Reyero, Observadores. Estudiosos, aficionados y turistas dentro del cuadro (Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Servei de Publicacions, 2008), 15. 86 Fontanella, La imprenta y las letras, 43. 87 Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, 6. 88 Roger Chartier, ‘General introduction: Print culture’, in Roger Chartier (ed.), The Cultural Uses of the Print in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 1. 89 Ramón de Valladares y Saavedra, ‘Utilidad de las estampas y de su uso’, Semanario Pintoresco Español, 11 February 1844, 48. See Pla Vivas’s analysis of the article in La ilustración gráfica, 101–2. 90 On collections assembled in nineteenth-century Madrid, see Lou CharnonDeutsch’s excellent chapter ‘What they saw: Women’s exposure to and in



Seeing in the city 75

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

visual culture in nineteenth-century Spain’, in Xon de Ros and Geraldine Hazbun (eds.), A Companion to Spanish Women’s Studies (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis, 2011), 189–210. Also on this subject, see Elizabeth Siegel (ed.), Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 91 Charnon-Deutsch, ‘What they saw’, 191. 92 Ortega, ‘Imaginar la lectura’, 91. 93 Borja Rodríguez Gutiérrez, ‘Las estampas literarias decimonónicas. Élites y masas: Popularización, contaminación, apropiación y desprecio’, in Dolores Thion Soriano-Mollá and Jorge Urrutia (eds.), De élites y masas: Textualizaciones (Madrid: Devenir, 2013), 241. 94 Charnon-Deutsch, ‘What they saw’, 191. 95 Benito Pérez Galdós, Fortunata y Jacinta (Dos historia de casadas) (Madrid: Imprenta de la Guirnalda, 1887), 298. 96 Benito Pérez Galdós, La de Bringas (1884; Madrid: Peraldo, Paéz y Compañía, 1906), 234. 97 Original drawings of Madrid Cómico and Blanco y Negro, held at the Museo de Historia in Madrid and the Museo ABC de la Ilustración, respectively, were consulted. Archivists at the Museo de Historia indicated that marks on the sketches had possibly resulted from being pinned on the wall. Although this information remains speculative, it appears to be a feasible explanation for the sketches’ deterioration when read in conjunction with accounts from the period. 98 See, for example, figure 1.7 and Juan Comba, ‘Madrid: Los teatros y sus públicos’, IEA, 1 (8 January 1883), 13. 99 This collage is exceptional for El Motín. Despite its progressive and critical stance against the monarchy and clergy, this gazette was visibly conservative in formal terms. It tended to follow the layout and style of satirical publications like La Flaca, which was founded during the Sexenio, and which was four pages long and featured a single-page illustration. 100 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 91–3, 97–102. 101 Daniel Frost, Cultivating Madrid. Public Space and Middle-Class Culture in the Spanish Capital, 1833–1890 (Lewisburg PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008), 21. 102 On this subject, see Borja Carballo, Rubén Pallol, and Fernando Vicente, El Ensanche de Madrid: Historia de una capital (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 2008); and Charlotte Vorms, Bâtisseurs de banlieue à Madrid. Le quartier de la Prosperidad (1860–1936) (Paris: Créaphis, 2012). 103 Jesusa Vega, ‘Del espectáculo de la ciencia a la práctica artística cortesana: Apuntes sobre la fortuna de la fotografía en España’, Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares, 68:2 (2013), 362n9, 364–5. See, for example, ‘Palacio de Buenavista’, Semanario Pintoresco Español, 8 (1 May 1836), 41. 104 Charnon-Deutsch explains that cross-fertilisation between photograph and xylographic engraving, which mutually influenced one another even decades

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

76

Madrid on the move

after the introduction of photomechanical reproduction, was both a sign and effect of the reader’s demand for ‘visual evidence’. Hold that Pose, 63, 68. 105 Charnon-Deutsch notes that stating that an image was ‘de fotografía’ guaranteed its authenticity. Depending on the dexterity of the draftsmen and their use of traditional hand engraving techniques, the engraved sketch could be more or less photograph like. While the ‘truth claims’ of a photograph or photograph-like image seemed to surpass that of the hand engraving, magazine editors realised that both photographs and engravings could be used in similar ways to enhance or minimise the traits of the subject. Hold that Pose, 57, 62, 68. 106 Eusebio Martínez de Velasco, ‘Nuestros grabados’, IEA, 25 (8 July 1885), 3. 107 On the subject of rotogravure, see Andrés Mario Zervigón, ‘Rotogravure and the modern aesthetic of news reporting’, in Hill and Schwartz (eds.), Getting the Picture, 197–205. Other examples of this type of layout include Juan Comba, ‘Carabanchel (Madrid). Vista general y detalle del asilo benéfico de Vista Alegre, inaugurado por S.M. la Reina Regente el 20 de abril último’, IEA, 28 (30 July 1889); ‘Entierro del Excmo. Sr. Obispo de Madrid-Alcalá’, IEA, 16 (30 April 1886), 268. 108 Miguel B. Márquez, ‘Juan Comba y García, cronista gráfico de “La Restauración”’, Ámbitos, 15 (2006), 373. On Comba’s contributions to the press, also see Patricia Ayrault, ‘El reportaje gráfico en La Ilustración Española y Americana y Juan Comba’, in La prensa ilustrada en España, 99–108. 109 Riego, La construcción social, 239. 110 Reyero, Observadores, 73. 111 Riego, La construcción social, 145. 112 Ibid.; and Rebecca Haidt, ‘Flores en Babilonia: Los “gritos de Madrid” y el imaginario urbano hacia 1850’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 10:3 (2009), 304–5. An embryonic version of these ideas was explored in Vanesa Rodríguez-Galindo, ‘Visuality and practices of looking in nineteenth-century Madrid: Representations of the old and modern city in the illustrated press’, in Robert Beck, Ulrike Krampl, and Emmanuelle Retaillaud-Bajac (eds.), Les cinq sens de la ville du Moyen Âge à nos jours (Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 2013). 113 Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth Century, 316–19. On the construction of the concept of suceso in the Spanish press, see Riego, La construcción social, 169–75. 114 Baudelaire, ‘The painter of modern life’, 1. 115 Cuvardic García, ‘El punto de vista panorámico’, 38. 116 See Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, Manual de Madrid. Descripción de la Corte y de la Villa (Madrid: Imp. de M. de Burgos, 1833); Mesonero Romanos, Nuevo manual histórico-topográfico-estadístico, y descripción de Madrid (Madrid: Imprenta de la Viuda de Antonio Yenes, 1854). 117 Frost, Cultivating Madrid, 17. 118 Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, Manual histórico-topográfico, administrativo y artístico de Madrid (Madrid: Imprenta de D. Antonio Yerres, 1844), 442.



Seeing in the city 77

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

119 Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, ‘El nuevo Madrid (Despedida) (1876)’, in Germán Rueda (ed.), Cuadros de Costumbres. Tipos, caracteres, grupos y bocetos por el Curioso parlante (Madrid: Homolegens, 2010), 334–6. 120 Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 150–1. 121 Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, ‘Vista general de la Puerta del Sol’, IEA, 1, supplement (3 January 1871), 18. 122 Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity, Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 35. 123 Selected prints published in Fernández de los Ríos’s guidebook were reproduced in IEA, 5 (8 February 1877). 124 Frost, Cultivating Madrid, 17. 125 Ildefonso Cerdà, Teoría general de la urbanización y aplicación de sus principios y doctrinas a la reforma y ensanche de Barcelona (Madrid: Imprenta española, 1867), vol. 1, 7. 126 Emilio Valverde, Plano y guía del viajero en Madrid. Guía práctico Valverde ilustrado con profusión de grabados (Madrid: Est. tip. de los sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1884), 17. 127 Eusebio Martínez de Velasco, ‘Nueva York – Movimiento en el “Broadway”’, IEA, 8 (28 February 1875), 131. 128 Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, introduction to Cosgrove and Daniels (eds.), The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1. 129 José Pilar Morales, Guía del plano de Madrid y sus contornos en 1880, 5th ed. (Madrid: Imp. De Nicolás González, 1880), 3. 130 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1974; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), esp. 33–42, 147–68. For a study of Lefebvre’s theory as applied to the Spanish city, see Benjamin Fraser, Henri Lefebvre and the Spanish Urban Experience (Plymouth: Bucknell University Press, 2011). 131 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 97–102. 132 Alain Pottage, ‘The measure of land’, Modern Law Review, 57: 3 (May 1994), 366. Pottage makes this argument in relation to British estate maps. 133 Ibid., 367. 134 Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002), 180. Bruno gives as an example an estate in Chiswick dating from 1736. 135 Homann’s map, dated 1735, was titled Accurater Grundris der Königl. Spanischen Haupt und Residenz stadt Madrit mit denen Prospecten des königl schlosses und andern Lust Gebaeuen. 136 Cosgrove and Daniels, ‘introduction’, 7–8.

2

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Making modernity: images, words, and cross-national connections

Words are witnesses which often speak louder than documents. —Eric Hobsbawm

By the final decades of the nineteenth century, Madrid’s urban landscape had experienced substantial changes. There were many ways of capturing and communicating the effects of modernisation. Images and texts depicted monumental views and sweeping vistas of newly renovated spaces as well as more intimate scenes focusing on street life and social types. Graphic artists and writers played a fundamental role in articulating meanings of the modern and of modernisation, two concepts that were defined and continually debated during these decades. The mid-nineteenth century was a crucial period in the history of the Spanish language. The discussion surrounding these terms echoed contemporaneous debates about the unstable nature of terminology and the practice of word-borrowing at a time when societies were becoming more interconnected. Debates not only surfaced among journalists but were also tackled in costumbrista collections. They interrogated the meanings and semantics of words like modernisation and urbanisation, as well as other neologisms and expressions that were gradually entering colloquial language. Their reflections offer valuable insight into what being modern meant to Madrid’s nineteenth-century inhabitants. What emerges in these accounts is an idea of modernisation in which multiple aspects intersected, including preexisting practices, foreign influence, and the insecurities and shifts that accompanied this kind of process not only in Spain but arguably in other European societies too.1 Across Europe approaches and responses to modernisation were being negotiated in similar ways. For this reason, it is important to reframe Madrid’s cultural representations within broader debates. Two feelings that commonly arose in Madrid were nostalgia and recollection, and reconceptualisations of time were fundamental in mediating change.2 Some historians of Spain have argued that Spanish citizens resisted adapting to technological progress and advances introduced elsewhere in Europe. However, as we



Making modernity 79

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

explored in the introduction, recent histories of Spanish modernity study the duality of new and old, reframing modernity as something other than a binary division of winners and losers. Moreover, feelings of nostalgia or uncertainty were not particular to the Spanish context but were part and parcel of the modernising process and, in fact, demonstrate that people in Madrid were confronting the challenge in myriad ways, with a clear sense of awareness of what was at stake. Self-awareness and historical consciousness were therefore essential factors in shaping meanings of the modern in nineteenth-century Madrid.3 Chapter 4 is devoted to exploring the central role nostalgia and memory played in shaping Madrileños and their grasp of the visual tropes employed to talk about the past. The present chapter, on the other hand, explores the construction of visually aware citizens who looked outward. Awareness of international trends and economic exchanges was crucial in citizens’ management of the transformations that accompanied modernisation. This understanding is at odds with discourses that describe modernity as a shock of the new and a break from the past, discourses that derive from the fundamental work of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin framed modernity as a break with the past and a continual shock, a process that crystallised in the nineteenth century with the consolidation of urban renewal projects and public spectatorship. Benjamin explored the experience of modernity as a radical discontinuity probed by the ephemeral, fleeting, and transitory qualities that Baudelaire associated with modern life during the second half of the century.4 The weight given to acceleration – of societal changes, of physical movement – has led to a commonplace that rupture is at the centre of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century experience.5 The visual culture of a so-called peripheral city like Madrid, however, brings to the fore the shortcomings of this account of modernity as break, while also exposing how historical awareness and consciousness of change worked. When notions like break and rupture are replaced by the less restrictive terms of dialogue and negotiation, we can see that references to the past or extant aesthetic conventions were an integral part of modernisation. Moving away from the concept of rupture or shock of the new brings cross-cultural communication into the picture. In Spain, debates revolved around the need to adapt to foreign models and articulate home-grown ones as citizens considered how the capital might move towards an integrated European stage. Although urbanisation and the unrelenting forces of progress drew mixed feelings, the debates rarely presented alternative projects; what was transmitted instead was a sense of predictability about what the future held. Despite their differences, Western nations shared a need to keep up with their peers in an increasingly industrialised setting. The emphasis that Madrid’s visual culture placed on European typologies,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

80

Madrid on the move

customs, and fashion was not merely evidence of uninspired imitation but a process of people coming to terms with how these processes played out in Madrid. Decentring the place of modernity entails an acknowledgement that all societies were in a certain sense ‘ordinary’, experiencing their share of successes and failures. All cities and societies borrowed notions of the modern – not only the so-called second-rate or peripheral cities. All places also had a hand in creating these notions, which yielded distinct expressions of adaptation and cultural awareness that connected parts of the world in new ways.6 Given such interdependence and unevenness, the conceptual binaries of tradition/modernity and centre/periphery that have stifled readings of Madrid’s modernity and its cultural representation are subsumed within this account. Illustrations and caricatures reproduced in the press played an important role in shaping ideas of the modern. As mass-produced artefacts they reflected the advances of industrial progress and the relationship between different European enterprises. Unlike academic literature or high art, the press had more freedom to use, question, and negotiate words and images. Words and images were not only vehicles of expression; they also shaped entirely new concepts that helped make sense of entangled perceptions of urbanisation and modern citizenship. Representations of metropolitan life indicated that social commentators of the time felt a pressing need to describe the meanings of modernity and the ways in which foreign models were interwoven with local ones. We cannot simply compare Spain to Europe or build a national (and therefore exclusive) account of m ­ odernisation; instead, we must expose the hybrid character of nineteenth-century understandings of the modern. Binary oppositions run the risk of hampering a coherent account of societies living at the crossroads of multiple traditions, influences, and cultures. Rather, a scholarly focus on the confluence of the old and the new is more consistent with how nineteenth-century citizens expressed their feelings towards modernisation. Scholars of Spain have long studied the uneasy coexistence between tradition and modernity. It is now time to address this coexistence in light of new understandings of transnational relations and the intercultural effects they produced. If modernity is a multicausal, multilayered phenomenon, then we must look beyond the nation for histories of the modern.7 Overcoming Franocentric and canonical narratives of modernity does not imply ignoring Paris’s unrivalled role in nineteenth-century culture but instead entails explaining cultural modernity at a deeper level, reconceptualising the relation of existing representations with new ones, and embracing untidy historical and intellectual realities.8 Conceiving Spanish modernisation as a part of a broader set of transnational contacts reveals that Madrid did not



Making modernity 81

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

merely imitate foreign models but actively weighed up to what degree they were adequate in this particular local setting. This chapter examines discussions surrounding foreign expressions and neologisms like modernizar (modernise), as well as the innovative visual sequences artists devised to communicate the meaning of new activities and terminology. Illustrators assessed the modern moment and sought the best way to communicate the intertwining of local practices and foreign trends. The chapter also looks at the debates that emerged in the public and political arena about urbanisation and the effects of demolition and construction on daily life and the city’s appearance. Rather than dwelling on the consequences of change as a traumatic event, participants in these debates focused on the foreseeability and viability of these projects, inscribing them within broader processes of urban renewal occurring elsewhere in Europe. While voices opposed the heterogenous effects of industrialisation, they also proposed other ways of being modern. At the heart of these discussions was a persistent drive to define how modernity played out in Madrid and the capital’s place within the broader landscape of urban development. Meanings of the modern were not only dictated by linguistic authorities and urban technocrats but were debated, lived, and constructed on a daily basis.

What is in a word? The meanings of modernity

Modernity is a loaded concept that has been at the heart of several public and scholarly debates since the nineteenth century. What it means to us today is conditioned by numerous images, texts, and histories written by cultural critics since the early twentieth century. While there are many definitions of modernity, scholars have reached a consensus on some key points that help frame the developments that occurred throughout the nineteenth century. As explained by Vanessa Schwartz and Jeannene Przyblyski, modernity was a structural transformation that occurred on the level of experience, social relations, and economic production. The origins of these transformations can be traced back to the French Revolution and the rise of a bourgeois society whose cultural, political, and socioeconomic position was consolidated in the nineteenth century. This narrative of Western modernity has provided a convenient framework for understanding the conspicuous link between visual experience and culture during this period. Pushed by industrialisation and technological innovation, middle-class consumer culture was centred in cities and yielded new forms of culture focalised on visual experience and ways of producing, accessing, and exchanging information.9 One of the shortcomings of dominant narratives of modernity is that cities like Paris and London are viewed as benchmarks of culture and

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

82

Madrid on the move

i­ndustry, thus demoting other cities that divert from this paradigm and framing modernity as a story of winners and losers. In recent decades the grand narrative of a single, monolithic modernity has given way to the analysis of case studies, or ‘modernities’, allowing for a more inclusive approach.10 Some of these studies explore provincial or folkloric modernities, thus reinstating local identities and nondominant urban centres within accounts of modernisation.11 Because of Spain’s peripheral location and late arrival to industrialisation, Spanish modernity comes with its own set of complexities. The foundational writings of the Generation of 1898 reinforced readings of the nineteenth century as a time characterised by a constant shift between polarised extremes of innovation and resistance, creation and submission, authenticity and imitation. It was not until the late 1990s that scholars began thinking about Spanish modernisation in less polarising and more positive terms, putting to rest the assumption that Spain’s modernising process had been a failure. Considering the convoluted history of modernity, to strip it of its baggage would seem to be an insurmountable task. A valuable exercise lies in exploring what being modern meant to people in nineteenth-century Madrid. The first step involves acknowledging that terms like modernidad (modernity), modernización (modernisation), and modernizar (modernise) were not common or widespread terms in nineteenth-century Spain. Nineteenth-century graphic artists and writers had very different ways of reflecting on everyday life and the capital’s social and urban landscape. Despite their differences in aims, ideological leanings, and formal qualities, periodicals exhibited a persistent concern with investigating the meanings of modernity. This concern extended to other forms of Madrid’s cultural production, and academics, writers, and artists interrogated the usage and definitions of terms like modernizar. As the next chapter will further explore, towards the end of the century, animated debates revolved around the introduction of neologisms, Anglicisms, Gallicisms, Americanisms, and an array of expressions that had not yet been standardised and that were assimilated and reworked to fit Spanish understandings of modernity. Legislators and politicians even considered whether the new press laws should regulate publications in foreign languages that circulated within Spain.12 Interplay between foreign and Spanish terms was common in the press and was further accentuated by the use, or even overuse, of italics, which made certain expressions and words stand out on the page. In addition, images contributed to these discussions by illustrating the novelty that certain expressions contained in the context of everyday life. Thus, form was just as important as meaning. The typography and allocation of words and images allowed the reader to create newfound associations and appropriate both utterances and their meanings in alternative ways.



Making modernity 83

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Advances in typesetting in the late nineteenth century enabled experimental layouts and letterings in all sorts of printed media, including books and serialised novels, and these experiments in form enhanced or downplayed the emotional connotations of the message, giving the paper format an added textural quality.13 Readers were familiar with these typographic techniques, and writers exploited the added meaning they could extend to words and expressions that reached well beyond the established parameters of standardised language. These typographic techniques were especially important when it came to describing new practices and terminologies that demanded more than just words to convey their meaning. In 1867, the newspaper Gil Blas published a brief piece that lampooned how the writer Fernán Caballero (the pseudonym of Cecilia Böhl de Faber) had experimented with new words, including the verb modernizar. Caballero had published an article called ‘El buen sentido’ (Common sense) in a local newspaper from Seville called El Independiente where she devised a series of terms that were mocked by the writer in Gil Blas: En la forma ¡oh! en cuanto a la forma hay cosas que es preciso verlas y leerlas para creerlas; se halla el verbo modernizar, el adjetivo paradojal, por paradójico, y sobre todo, el cuco o ingenioso calificativo de chaclueco, que yo desafío al más guapo a que le encuentre su acepción y origen.14 (In the form, oh!, in regard to form, there are some things that must be seen and heard to be believed; among them is the verb modernise, the adjective paradoxic for paradoxical, and especially the endearing or ingenious term chaculueco; I challenge the fairest of you all to discover its acceptation and origin.)

The generally misogynist undertone of the rest of the piece suggests that the writer in Gil Blas was aware that Fernán Caballero was a woman. Other than modernizar, which gradually entered common usage, the terms ridiculed here did not become widespread. What this brief review highlighted was not so much the subject of Fernán Caballero’s article but how she experimented with the formal qualities of language, which some writers like the reviewer in Gil Blas considered a linguistic transgression. The second half of the nineteenth century was marked by many such discussions about terms, at a time when debates about the unstable nature of terminology and the practice of word-borrowing were becoming widespread, and societies were becoming ever more interconnected. As editorial and commercial relations between European centres solidified, translation became an important market tool in the publishing industry, and a growing number of works were translated for a Spanish audience.15 There was also an audience interested in bilingual and even trilingual dictionaries, as evidenced by Manuel Scheidnagel’s Spanish–English–French ­dictionary

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

84

Madrid on the move

of  1879 (figure 2.1). This volume gathered frequent idioms and used a straightforward three-column layout to present equivalent terms in all three languages. Rather than covering definitions and translations in an exhaustive manner, the wordbook focused on a select number of terms and expressions. It is indicative of the audience’s familiarity with certain foreign terminology and, moreover, evidences which customs editors believed transcended national boundaries. By linking these words, the dictionary enhanced and shaped their meaning. Despite the growing presence of the term modernizar towards the end of the century, it was only recognised in 1925 by the Real Academia Española (Spanish Royal Academy), an institution that, to this day, continues to dictate standardised usage of the Spanish language. Before then, however, modernizar appeared in nonofficial dictionaries published in France, first in Eugenio Salvá’s Nuevo diccionario de la lengua castellana (1846), and later in Elías Zerolo’s Diccionario enciclopédico de la lengua castellana (1895). These dictionaries responded to editors’ desire to capitalise on marketing non-academic texts to a Spanish-American audience.16 These dictionaries reveal that the new patterns of producing, consuming, and marketing applied not only to things but also to words. At the same time, the ­dictionaries echoed critical attitudes towards the Real Academia, which was considered to be overly conservative in its restriction of neologisms. The subtitle of Salvá’s dictionary boldly claimed that his dictionary was ‘la última edición íntegra, muy rectificada y mejorada del publicado por la Academia Española y unas veinte y seis mil voces, acepciones, frases y locuciones, entre ellas muchas americanas’ (the latest integral, highly corrected, and improved edition of the Spanish Academy’s edition, with twenty-six thousand new definitions, meanings, phrases, and locutions, among them many American). Salvá categorised modernizar as a neologism meaning ‘dar una forma moderna a lo que es antiguo’ (to endow the old with modern form).17 Salvá also significantly extended the definition of moderno, which did appear in the Real Academia’s 1852 edition, albeit with a scant thirtyword definition. Salvá included a lengthy definition for the term, featuring examples that demonstrated that moderno was used as both an adjective and a noun, in which case it referred to a group of people, namely artists and writers following the latest trends. Notably, the first example given was a direct reference to urban change and the benefit that modern people received from gas and public lighting.18 Technological innovation, urbanisation, and industrialisation were also being defined in this era. In fact, it was not until 1899 that the terms urbanización (urbanisation) and urbanizar (to urbanise) were accepted by the Academy, and the verb was defined as the action of building on empty plots of land as well as developing social and urbane citizens.19 The Catalan

Making modernity 85



     francés, inglés y español113

Español.   Inglés.   Francés.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Mitigar to mitigate mitiguer. Mitologia mythology mythologie. Mitológico mythological mithologique. Mitra mitre mitre. Mixto mixed mixte. Mochila knapsack havre-sac. Mochuelo owl hibou. slime Moco morce. snuff Mocoso mucous morveux. Moda fashion mode. Modales manners manières. Modelar to modal modeler. Modelo model modéle. Moderado moderate modéré. Moderno modero moderne. Modestia modesty modestie. Modificar to modify modifier. maniére. Modo manner maniére d’être. Modulacion modulation modulation. Modular to modulate moduler. Mofa mockery moquerie. Mofarse to sneer railler. moss Moho mousse. rust Mojadura wetting mouillure. Mojar to wet mouiller. Molde mould moule. Moldear to mould mouler. Mole (vast size) (masse grande). moudre. Moler to grind piler. Molestar to molest molester. Molestia molestation incommodité. fâcheux. Molesto troublesome incommode. Molido tired moulu. Molinero miller meunier. Molino mill moulin. Momentáneo momentary momentané. Momento moment moment.  8*

{

{

{

{

{

{ {

2.1  Manuel Scheidnagel, Vocabulario de los idiomas francés, inglés y español: compuesto de todos los vocablos, verbos y adjetivos que se relacionan comúnmente [sic] para la mejor inteligencia de los tres idiomas (Madrid, 1879), 119

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

86

Madrid on the move

urban planner Ildefonso Cerdà has been credited for coining the term in his massive work Teoría general de la urbanización (1867).20 This treatise was, ultimately, a 1,500-page elucidation of what it meant to build modern cities in the second half of the nineteenth century. Cerdà, like other urban planners of his era, was not only an engineer but also a social theorist who, through his projects, envisioned improvements that at once served architectural purposes and engaged with the social issues that resulted from city planning.21 The verb modernizar first appeared in the illustrated press in the 1870s and 1880s to describe the process of urbanisation taking hold across Europe.22 However, these instances were not the first utterances of the term. The verb modernizar appeared in the illustrated women’s periodical La Moda Elegante in the 1860s and 1870s, coinciding with the satirical piece in Gil Blas. The women’s weekly was first printed in Cádiz, but following its acquisition by the entrepreneur and editor Abelardo de Carlos, its premises relocated to Madrid in 1868. De Carlos went on to purchase the popular gazette El Museo Universal in 1869 and, in a brilliant marketing move, he offered subscribers of La Moda Elegante a discount on his new editorial project. It was an extremely successful women’s publication for its time, and it remained in print until 1927. The gazette counted a number of contributors, including leading women writers of the period like Patrocinio de Biedma, as well as María del Pilar Sinués de Marco, well known for her etiquette manuals, which were reprinted throughout the second half of the century.23 La Moda Elegante included intricate illustrations of models and fashion items, from sophisticated patterns, headpieces, and elaborate hairstyles to boots, gloves, and other accessories. The main draw for its readers rested in its presentation of Parisian style and fashion, something that was highlighted in the gazette’s subtitle, which advertised the p ­ ublication’s elegant drawings of crochet, upholstery, and canevas (a Gallicism that referred to a type of embroidery). Across a dozen issues of La Moda Elegante, women were shown how to alter their attire in order to ‘modernizar los trajes algo antiguos’ (modernise somewhat dated outfits).24 These recommendations were accompanied by a set of drawings that illustrated alterations and possible conversions of different garments (figure 2.2). The success of the female fashion magazine was based on the reader’s ability to interpret specific forms rather than the physical qualities of the materials.25 Since the eighteenth century, there had been a second-hand trade of garments, and women carried out their alterations within a domestic setting that was, in reality, very much a public industry.26 The success of women’s fashion magazines in the second half of the nineteenth century, coupled with the industrialisation of the textile industry and the rise in the number of dressmakers in Madrid, made these

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Making modernity 87

2.2  La Moda Elegante, 32 (30 August 1871), 252–3

fashion practices visible and part of public discourse. It is probable that Fernán Caballero’s understanding of the word modernizar did not rely solely on her knowledge of French, English, and German but instead had more to do with her familiarity with this genre of women’s literature and the jargon of female fashion, as well as her knowledge of the demands of the publishing industry.27 What is significant about La Moda Elegante’s usage of the term modernizar was its visual character, which was transmitted through elaborate sketches and sequences that walked readers through the steps required to rejuvenate outmoded items. Modernizar was conceptualised in visual terms and conveyed as a physical and concrete action that implied renewing something that was outdated with a more expedient, contemporary, and cosmopolitan approach. These qualities mirrored how middle-class audiences were coming to articulate meanings of the modern. Fashion, after all, has been a mainspring in the expansion of modern consumer culture, and the illustrated fashion magazine played an important role in this process through its customary combination of information, imagery, and middle-class ideology.28 Meanings of the modern were directly linked to the scope and convenience of foreign models and to changing ideas of what was considered fashionable, up to date, and relevant. Further, reactions to this fashion were themselves widespread in the press and emblematic of

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

88

Madrid on the move

­ odernity; mockery of the latest fashion, such as outlandish sleeves, was m at once a form of social commentary on foreign influence and a source of comic relief in both Spanish and European print cultures.29 The debate surrounding the Real Academia’s conservative stance and the assimilation of foreign expressions relates to a period in which words were being regularised and new terms created. Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, écriture and différance, comes to mind when speaking of the construction of meaning and language. Despite the variegated readings that his provocative work ignites, what he did incisively elucidate was that meanings and language are not static but are constantly shifting depending on the larger system of representation to which they belong. The values we ascribe to signifiers – that is, the sounds of words perceived through our hearing or the symbols that make up a written word – are constantly subject to mediation since they depend on larger structures of meaning and unstable ties between signifiers.30 In this sense, what was being discussed in Madrid’s press was not only the definitions of modernity and modernisation but also the system of representation that sustained these concepts and allowed for a coherent structure that combined issues relating to intercultural relations, urban renewal, class, identity, and everyday life. The ongoing debates about neologisms provide a valuable insight into how people coped with urban change and European influence. The late nineteenth-century discussion about the status of journalism versus academy was felt in the press as well as in other circles and became increasingly pressing as the newspaper industry continued to increase its reach thanks to its cheapness and immediacy.31 Commentaries on new terminologies directly referenced the expanding markets for French and British fashion and the transnational connections that were established between different countries. Writer Julio Nombela lampooned both the overuse of English terms and the Academy’s conservative attitude, and noted, in 1873, that certain Anglicisms would never make it through ‘las aduanas de la Academia’ (the Academy’s border controls).32 An article published in La Ilustración Española y Americana in 1874 entitled ‘Carta de un andaluz hablador a un madrileño malhablado’ (Letter from a talkative Andalusian to a foul-mouthed Madrileño) employed a satirical tone to convey the extent to which language was being modified in the Spanish capital: Nos suelta a cada paso, confortable, remarkable, hotel, restaurant, restaurateur, ambigú, soirée, etc, etc.; majaderías con que algunos pretenden aparentar educación distinguida y dicción esmerada … y no es raro oír una voz femenina preguntando a la salida de un omnibus, diligencia o cualquier otro vehículo de los que se alquilan por asientos: ‘¿cogen ahí dos señoras?’ La contestación debiera ser: ‘caben o no caben; pero aquí no tenemos tan mala educación como para coger a las señoras’.33



Making modernity 89 (At every step someone spouts comfortable, remarkable, hotel, restaurant, restaurateur, ambigú, soirée, etc. etc. nonsense with which some people hope to pretend they have a distinguished education and conscientious diction … and it is not rare to hear a female voice asking at the exit of an omnibus, processional carriage, or any of those other vehicles you rent by the seat: ‘will you take two ladies?’ The answer should be: ‘you either fit or you don’t; but we do not have such bad manners here as to take women’.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The satirical tone taken in the press signals, to a certain extent, feelings of uncertainty in the face of foreign models.34 But no matter how strongly discontent was expressed, these texts expose much more than resentment. The overriding presence of a new lexicon, coupled with depictions of contemporary practices and pastimes such as boarding a tram or visiting an exhibition, was at the heart of Madrid’s cultural production. Critiques of innovative terminology must be read in conjunction with the popular print culture that housed them. Furthermore, the use of satire as a way of discussing contemporary trends and social practices was central in moulding ideas of the modern both in Spain and abroad. Illustrators and writers put new words and expressions in close relation to observations of the city’s changing social and urban landscape, as the ‘madrileño malhablado’ shows. The ‘Letter from a talkative Andalusian’ named just some of the foreign terms that appeared in the press. A variety of foreign expressions, adjectives, and nouns were published on the pages of the press, in both articles and captions. This phenomenon did not go unnoticed, with some writers remarking that the Spanish language was undergoing ‘a daily revolution’.35 The new terms tended to refer to attitudes and behaviours linked to practices of seeing, consumption, fashion, and public space. They included: kaleidoscópico, tres bien, merci, good night, god night, god morning, wery well, restaurant, high-life, high life, high liffe, buffet, skating-rink, skating rink, break-fast, dejeneur, flanear, flaner, estranjis, en la soirée, lunch, pari­ sien, coqueto, cocotte, panorámico, beau monde, fourmille, meeting, speech, matinée, toilette, negligé, bon mot, echarpe, dandy, gentlemen, rendez-vous, squares, le mot, gurmet, carnet, and la fin.36 These expressions were sometimes unknowingly misspelled, at other times purposefully corrupted to fit with Spanish phonetics, or unnecessarily and inconsistently hyphenated and capitalised. And most often they were italicised because they were not standardised language, despite becoming prevalent in the vernacular. Looking at these terms, Derrida’s famous use of typography comes to mind. He used typesetting to demonstrate that the meanings readers assign to words are partly linked to their visual presentation and formatting on the page. His work explored how different type sizes or unconventional formatting of sentences disconcerted the reader and therefore also constituted a form of signification.37 The number and, at times, the succession

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

90

Madrid on the move

of italicised words reproduced in the press suggest that to the nineteenthcentury reader these words truly stood out on the page. During the second half of the century the visual impact of typography did not go unnoticed. Innovative typography appeared in advertisements and shop signs, which were designed to appear more enticing to the passers-by. In a piece titled ‘Los gritos de Madrid’ (The cries of Madrid, 1863), the costumbrista writer Antonio Flores described how the words and letters of shop signs had come to signify something different from what he believed to have been their original meaning.38 A reader who was merely skimming the pages of the press would find that a number of terms leapt out at their eyes. The words’ visual impact drew attention to the ways in which language was modified to describe a changing urban landscape and interrogate to what degree foreign influence was becoming entangled with local practices. It was in this context that the Royal Academy and journals including La Ilustración Española y Americana carried out a campaign that encouraged the depiction of contemporary customs while adhering to the purity of the Spanish language.39 Although these conservative factions privileged the use of accepted terminology, the sheer quantity and visibility of neologisms and foreign terms on the pages of the press tell a different story. If there was an effort to maintain the purity of the language, hundreds of words nonetheless seeped through. Academics were well aware that the Spanish language was being transformed, and they were uncertain about their ideal role in this development. Similarly, within the Real Academia, there was a dispute about whether to accept journalists into the membership, even those writing for conservative papers like Madrid Cómico and La Ilustración Española y Americana. Journalists, on the other hand, moved between expressing feelings of inferiority – when comparing themselves to novelists and essayists – and defending themselves as a driving force for change.40 The skirmish between journalists and academics was a subject of discussion throughout the later decades of the century. In 1871, the journalist and politician Ramón Rodríguez Correa attempted to find some balance in these deliberations. He critiqued the corruption of the language and the strange idiomatic turns used by journalists. Although he believed that these linguistic developments were driven by the press’s growing number of relatively ill-informed readers who privileged immediacy over quality, he also recognised the urgent need to use alternative terms to describe new objects and concepts in a more graphic manner and, consequently, to remain in line with a ‘universal ideology’.41 In a speech read at the Real Academia in 1895, a newly appointed member eloquently noted that journalists were criticised for being ‘rebelde a la gramática, contrabandista de locuciones y palabras extranjeras, corredora de frases hechas’



Making modernity 91

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(­grammatically ­ rebellious, ­ smugglers of foreign expressions and words, 42 brokers of idioms). Academics eventually recognised the importance of the press on account of its circulation, price, and reach, and they compromised by referring to it as ‘el libro del pobre’ (the poor man’s book).43 Because the boundaries between academic and everyday language, between high and low culture, were being debated, the meaning and form of words became a pressing matter. Intellectuals, journalists, and graphic artists realised that elucidating a word involved much more than referring to a simple definition in the dictionary. Explaining what a word meant involved thinking about one’s place in a broader global setting and, furthermore, required acknowledging the swiftness with which concepts could change due to the fast turnover of popular print culture. Illustrators also concerned themselves with the inner workings of language and its fluctuating meanings. Pieces like ‘Modismos del lenguaje’ (Idioms of language), a series printed throughout 1874 in the satiric gazette El Mundo Cómico, capitalised on the interplay between text and words to explore the function of commonplace idioms (figure 2.3). This satirical gazette ran from 1872 to 1876 and was founded in Madrid by Josep Lluís Pellicer, a leading graphic artist throughout the 1870s and the Restoration. The sequence of sketches in ‘Modismos’ evidences the magazine’s efforts to experiment with new forms of visual storytelling. Its layout echoes a tradition of caricature that emerged in France around the 1840s and precluded the comic strip.44 It represents a break from the visual storytelling methods of the early picture magazines of the 1830s and 1840s, which had

2.3  Manuel Luque, ‘Modismos del lenguaje’, El Mundo Cómico, 77 (19 April 1874), 4–5

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

92

Madrid on the move

i­ntroduced technology to print illustrations and words on the same page and had trained readers in the methods of interpreting images and texts in just a few glances. In contrast with these early magazines, the illustrated press of the 1870s, and satirical magazines in particular, revolutionised visual storytelling by combining sketches with titles, subtitles, and captions commenting on the image or reproducing dialogues between characters. This type of narrative was rehearsed throughout the second half of the century. However, it was not until the mid-1870s and 1880s that this ­visual-textual story, called historieta (narrative cartoon strip) in Spanish, took off, propelled by magazines like El Mundo Cómico and La Caricatura and the cartoonists Ramón Cilla, Pellicer, and Eduardo Sáenz Hermúa (who drew under the pseudonym Mecáchis).45 This kind of layout allowed for the exploration of terminology and highlighted the transformative power that images had in reframing familiar expressions. The title ‘Modismos’ was reprised in La Caricatura a decade later by Mecachis, who would come to be a major caricaturist throughout the 1890s.46 Like their Spanish peers, caricaturists in other European cities addressed the subject of language throughout the final decades of the century, as was the case of the popular London paper Punch. In ‘A choice of idioms’, printed in 1887, an elderly couple is pictured exiting a pharmacy in France (figure 2.4). The caption below comically addressed the way in which the British couple compared the meaning of two French expressions, ‘nimporte’ and ‘sarner fairy hang’, a comical transliteration to English of ça ne fait rien (it doesn’t matter). This drawing was reprinted in roughly 1904 in a volume dedicated to Punch’s illustrations of the British on the European continent, Mr Punch on the continong [sic]. Featuring 152 illustrations, the volume clarified in its foreword that, unlike the French and German comic press, Punch harboured no ill feelings towards other Europeans. Rather than lampooning Europeans, it sought to depict British people engaging in daily activities on the European continent to ‘contrast their behaviour’. To further strengthen this point, the foreword underlined that the illustrations were even executed by a Frenchman, proving that ‘long before the Governments of France and Great Britain had come into their present friendliness, Mr Punch had maintained his own Entente Cordiale!’47 This incisive statement was not just a comment on the recent agreements between the countries; it was evidence of the dialogue that existed for decades among European publishing industries. Furthermore, it shows to what extent foreign expressions were negotiated all over Europe, albeit with different priorities depending on specific national and local concerns. In this sense, Madrid was just one more place where foreign expressions were being negotiated.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Making modernity 93

2.4  George du Maurier ‘A choice of idioms’, Punch’s Almanack for 1888 (8 December 1887)

‘El Skating Rink’

Throughout the later decades of the nineteenth century, illustrators actively explored the flexible and unstable nature of language. In addition, they realised that new pastimes and social practices, such as skating, called for innovations in both language and visual expressions, and images proved to be essential carriers of meaning. Analysis of new spaces like the skating rink was another way of exploring what being modern entailed and demonstrated cultural producers’ engagement with transformations occurring in Madrid and, moreover, their interest in enquiring into how foreign trends played out in their local context. A number of social and visual chroniclers put their minds to defining what the worldwide trend of skating meant in the Spanish capital.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

94

Madrid on the move

2.5  El siglo futuro, 675 (31 January 1878)

The mid-1870s witnessed a boom in roller skating and the opening of rinks across Europe and North America.48 As in other cities across Europe, theatres in Madrid accommodated spaces for roller skating, and the city’s first rink opened in 1876,49 although roller skating would never acquire the same level of popularity in Madrid as it did in other European capitals. Ice skating, on the other hand, had a longer tradition in the Spanish capital. While audiences may not have had first-hand experience of ice skating, they had been exposed to graphic explorations of the topic and consumer items from the 1840s. For instance, the shop Almacén de los Alemanes, located on the central Calle de la Montera close to the Puerta del Sol, used eye-catching typesetting to promote their ice skates and advertise the latest inventions from Canada and Germany (figure 2.5). The proprietor of this establishment, Carlos Schropp, was credited with popularising the practice in Madrid through his importation of these products.50 The purchasing power of the upper class even inspired the novelist Emilia Pardo Bazán in 1881 to mordantly characterise one of her protagonists as a young woman with tailored skating outfits who was crazy about ‘el Skating’.51 But one of the constant concerns was of a more practical nature: Madrid’s climate was simply inadequate for ice skating, as ponds were scarce and the River Manzanares had little water and melted quickly.52 This circumstance gave way to numerous jokes in popular print culture, including tips on how to avoid drowning while ice skating, and a drawing in an 1888 illustrated book by Enrique Sepúlveda and Juan Comba pictured a fashionable ice skater enclosed in a frame of cracked ice.53 While people in Madrid were acquainted with ice skating, additional efforts were needed to define roller skating, due to the technological advance the equipment represented and the new social and spatial practices the activity encouraged. Between 1870 and 1890 there were nearly two thousand references to the term ‘skating’ in the Spanish press under



Making modernity 95

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

a variety of unintentionally or purposely misspelled words and phrases, including skating-rink, skating-ring, skating ring, skating rig, skating-hall, skating-club, circo skating (skating circus), and skatings.54 The form of the term was just as varied as urban chroniclers’ attempts to give the pastime a specific context. Among the attempts to define the term in words was a brief 1876 passage in Gaceta de caminos de hierro (Gazette of iron paths), a paper devoted to reporting on industry, inventions, canal systems, gas, navigation, telegraphs, and banking and credit associations.55 For the paper, skating was a way of experiencing the new principles of speed and travel through one’s own body. The action of skating was defined in a section devoted to a hotchpotch of new phenomena and events, such as innovative public works or the Philippines’ participation at a trade fair. The brief, 125-word article was entitled ‘Patinación’, a variant of the Spanish term for skating, patinaje (neither term would be recognised by the Spanish Royal Academy until the early twentieth century), and it attempted to describe the act of skating in both its technical and its social complexity. Other outlets, especially women’s magazines, sought to define the activity in visual terms, for example by presenting the latest skating attire and the norms of etiquette it required.56 Once again, female fashion magazines were pioneers in defining new social practices and assessing the impact of international fashions and commodities. New inventions like roller skates prompted sketchers to find ­inventive tools that could give an account of what skating entailed. Coinciding with the 1876 inauguration of Madrid’s first skating rink, La Ilustración Española y Americana printed an illustrated explanation of the latest roller skate perfected by the North American James Leonard Plimpton, who patented the four-wheeled contraption in 1863 (figure 2.6). Pictures of the improved mechanisms were printed alongside one of an assembled roller skate. The accompanying text stressed roller skates’ value as a modern,

2.6  ‘Patín de ruedas perfeccionado, conjunto y detalles’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 131 (8 April 1876), 245

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

96

Madrid on the move

international invention and lauded roller skating as a social activity that was leaving its mark in Madrid and the rest of Europe: ‘inaugurándose en el abandonado teatro de los Campos Elíseos de Madrid un Círculo de patinadores con ruedas, semejante a los que ya existían en Londres, Viena, Manchester, Brighton, Trouville, Dieppe, y otras poblaciones del extranjero, y creemos que también en Barcelona’ (In the abandoned theatre of Madrid’s Campos Elíseos, a Circle for skaters with wheels was inaugurated similar to the already existing ones in London, Vienna, Manchester, Brighton, Trouville, Dieppe, and other foreign towns, and we also believe in Barcelona).57 Shortly after La Ilustración Española y Americana published the images of Plimpton’s roller skates, the American inventor registered a patent for his invention in Spain.58 This moment was a turning point for roller skating not only in Spain but across Europe and the Americas. Between 1876 and 1878 there was a sharp rise in patent registrations for roller skates and associated improvements across Europe, and several rinks were inaugurated across the continent, from Saint Petersburg to Madrid and from Antwerp to Rome.59 Though the trend was ultimately fleeting, roller skating enjoyed an intense popularity among Madrid’s upper and middle classes during these years and presented industrialists with new business opportunities. Rinkomanía, which is how writers referred to the trend in multiple languages, occurred almost simultaneously across two continents and, more importantly, was practised and defined as part of an urban, cross-national phenomenon.60 Although roller skaters in Madrid had probably never travelled to rinks in New York or London, they were conscious of participating in a transnational fashion that was occurring at that very moment. Roller skating provided business opportunities across a fledgling entertainment industry. In addition to illustrations, it inspired theatrical pieces, zarzuelas (comic operas), and musical scores such as quadrilles, waltzes, and polkas.61 Musicians composed brief pieces intended to be performed at skating rinks across Europe, as was the case of Dionisio Granados’s 1877 composition for Madrid’s ‘orquesta de Skating Rink’ or the French composer Maximilien Graziani’s 1876 Le Skating (figures 2.7 and 2.8). These musical compositions show a fluid exchange on multiple levels, not just in their idiomatic and visual borrowings but in the playful and intimate atmosphere they attempted to recreate for rinks in Madrid and Paris. The satirical gazette Madrid Cómico also delved into the subject of roller skating, doing so in a centrefold published in 1886 (figure 2.9). Among the over one hundred satirical magazines launched in Spain from 1875 to 1895, Madrid Cómico was the most successful, and it became a staple in the popular culture of Madrid during the Restoration. Founded by Sinesio Delgado in 1880 and with Ramón Cilla as its main c­aricaturist, it was

Making modernity 97

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



2.7  Dionisio Granado, Los patinadores: valses para piano (Madrid: Pablo Martín Editor, 1877). Music score

Madrid on the move

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

98

2.8  Maximilien Graziani, Le skating: quadrille brillant pour piano par Maximilien Graziani (Paris: Alphonse Leduc Imp. Michelet, 1876). Music score

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Making modernity 99

2.9  Ramón Cilla, ‘Skating-Rink’, Madrid Cómico, 156 (13 February 1886), 4–5

the longest-running publication of its kind. Instrumental to its success was Delgado’s flair for marketing techniques and his ability to retain the readership’s attention by, in his words, being fresh, unique, and daring.62 His methods included the use of beauty and literary contests and a participatory approach that compelled the readership to take part in these competitions or send their views to the paper’s ‘Private Correspondence’ section in the hope of seeing their contributions printed on the pages of the weekly.63 Delgado knew well that the fledgling popular print culture in Madrid relied on enticing a middle-class readership. Writers of the time like Enrique Sepúlveda observed the gazette’s sharp marketing strategies and the expectation with which readers hoped to see their letters printed in the paper. Madrid Cómico was not as impressive as the sumptuous illustrated periodicals of the time, but it was a ‘periodiquito’ (a little newspaper) that offered some respite to readers with more recreational expectations in mind.64 Scholars have argued that this gazette promoted the conservative values of the Restoration and professed an antimodernist and nationalistic perspective. Yet, while Madrid Cómico was indeed supportive of the regime, as noted by Margot Versteeg, the paper was in itself a modern product that capitalised on the methods of an incipient mass industry. Its combination of text and illustration articulated an image of a changing city

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

100

Madrid on the move

and invited readers to participate in the shared experience of modernity.65 Furthermore, it ­concentrated on several contemporary concerns that resonated with readers, from the presence of women in public space and the implications this presence had on masculinity, to the effects of European influence on daily life. This is the context in which its 1886 ‘Skating-Rink’ was produced. The two-page centrefold ‘Skating-Rink’ was divided into six frames representing different instances at the rink and the clumsy actions and social exchanges that occurred while skating. The seemingly light-hearted illustration is an example of the satirical weekly’s trademark imagery, which laid out storylines by juxtaposing vignettes and shifting viewpoints. Slapstick scenes, references to conventional social types, attractive women, and encounters between men and women were some of its customary features. ‘Skating-Rink’ included two sketches of a man tumbling over, and one of a heap of unfortunate skaters piled up on the floor while a solitary skate floats adrift in the corner of the picture. In the bottom right-hand corner, a cleaner appeared to be sweeping the wreckage left behind after a day of skating, including severed limbs, heads, and unclaimed skates. The cleaner is presented in the style of the conventional figure of the street vendor depicted in prints of the late 1700s and early 1800s. Following this visual tradition, the cleaner appears against a blank background and is made recognisable by the tools of his trade – the cap on his head, the broom in his hands, and the dustpan at his feet. Although he lacks the vitality of the other characters in the illustration, he resonates with contemporary significance as an updated version of a conventional motif endowed with a new appearance and purpose. The picture of the cleaner delivers a final dose of humour to close the sequence and provides a signpost in the visual narrative, indicating the conclusion of the visual essay as well as the end of a day at the skating rink. The central motif of the composition was, however, that of an attractive woman and the interaction between the sexes that took place at the rink. The woman in the image serves two purposes. She lures the reader in, and she highlights the growing presence of respectable, middle-class women in public space.66 Beyond the novelty that the act of skating itself represented, the pastime became known for the proximity it allowed between men and women, and it was a source of comic relief across European print culture.67 Thus, the simple vignette in Madrid Cómico went beyond d ­ escribing skating as a physical activity and attempted to convey the contemporary significance of the new pastime and its effects on social and gender relations. The interest in this theme of gender relations crossed over to representations of skating in other forms of popular culture, including musical comedies like zarzuelas. Ramón Carriles’s 1877 theatrical piece Los Madriles (a colloquial expression to refer to the capital) featured an

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Making modernity 101

2.10  Jean Laurent, Skating Rink or Patinaje, altorrelieve en yeso (Skating, high relief in cast), 1878. High relief by Celestino García y Alonso. Photograph, negative

act called ‘Romperse el alma’ (Breaking your soul), a play on words that alluded to both the cumbersome falls and the heartbreak that occurred on the skating rink.68 Conveying feelings like anticipation or belonging has long been a challenge met by artists, photographers, and writers. Jean Laurent, one of Spain’s most prolific and reputed photographers, was known for his photo­graphs documenting monuments, artworks, urban spaces, and social types across Spain throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Like illustrators, he was also compelled to capture the exhilarating mix of intimacy and vitality generated by roller skating (figure 2.10), doing so in a photograph in high relief called Skating Rink. This relief was showcased in the 1878 Exhibition of Fine Arts in Madrid. Considering the date of the exhibition, the sculptor may have been inspired by the recently inaugurated rink at the Teatro de la Bolsa. Compared to the other sculptures in the show – the majority of which were busts and portraits of the king, commemorative medals, religious figures, and conventional allegories – Skating Rink was notable for its presentation of anonymous men and women and its spotlight on everyday life, changing socio-spatial practices, and gender relations.69 Visitors of the exhibition were likely drawn to this sculpture portraying women skating arm in arm, gentlemen greeting acquaintances, couples holding hands, and a woman awkwardly falling into the arms of a

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

102

Madrid on the move

man skating behind her. It is possible that the artwork captured Laurent’s eye not only for its novelty but also for its ability to do what his lens could not: capture rapid motion and the animated details that made skating scenes attractive to viewers. The photograph was, in a sense, a picture of a picture, and it gives insight into artists and writers’ concerns with defining the urban experience and Madrid’s relation to its broader, international context. These diverse expressions of visual culture and printed media did not offer a specific or static definition of skating. The term, instead, acquired meaning through a combination of sketches that linked the word to notions of the past, earlier visual styles, international trends, and the social interactions that the new pastime enabled. W. T. J. Mitchell’s fundamental concept of the ‘image-text’ sheds light on this matter. According to this scholar, neither images nor texts can be reduced to the meanings that they carry independently; rather, they are shaped by the relationships that occur between them.70 Nineteenth-century readers did not read captions, illustrations, and texts separately. In the words of one sociologist, ‘visuality and linguality are mutually constitutive meaning-makers’.71 Illustrations were (and are) components of larger structures of meaning in which the interplay between reading and seeing was fundamental in shaping ideas regarding public space, identity, and change. Representations of skating rinks did not merely refer to the venue where the new activity took place or to the innovative technology of the equipment, but instead described the social implications and experience that the expression entailed. As such, the images conveyed a sense of transformation and meaning in the making. Neither ice skating nor roller skating caught on in Madrid, and the activity ultimately declined in the early twentieth century. The reasons why this form of leisure never appealed to Madrid’s bourgeoisie requires a different type of study, but what does seem clear is that urban chroniclers observed shifts in taste, fashion, and sociability and looked for new ways of explaining the intersections between local practices and foreign trends.

Unseen and hardly shocking: demolition and construction Debates about modernisation and European influence were expressed in multiple ways. The images discussed so far have focused on new leisure spaces and social practices as well as on imposing city views (see chapter 1). These illustrations are significant not only for what they showed but also for what they omitted. Although they dealt with the effects of urban change in everyday life, these visual accounts of modernisation did not tackle the issue of demolition and construction in a direct way. Instead, prints and illustrations described urban reform through depictions of monuments,



Making modernity 103

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

imposing structures, vistas, and commemorative events.72 The comical press, on the other hand, provided social commentary on the effects that modernisation and foreign models had on everyday experiences and the daily life of ordinary citizens. While graphic artists did not refer directly to demolition, accompanying texts and articles commented on the effects of urbanisation and were particularly interested in Baron Haussmann’s innovative plans for Paris and his influence on the rest of Europe. Haussmann, who dubbed himself the ‘artist of demolition’, was instrumental in introducing new technologies that allowed him to conceive urban space as a coherent totality rather than as a piecemeal sum of individual projects.73 Social commentators in Spain were well aware of the urban projects taking hold in Europe. According to one 1870 article in La Ilustración de Madrid, ‘prefecto Hausuran [sic]’ was the main party responsible for Madrid’s ‘fiebre demoledora’ (demolishing fever) as well as for the remodelling projects occurring in other cities, where urban planners were compelled to alter city layouts as part of a broader process that was gradually creating a unified landscape across Europe. The article used a common technique of the period and enumerated the downfalls and benefits of urban transformation. What was lost in ‘carácter, originalidad y recuerdos’ (character, originality, and memories) was gained in ‘salubridad, amplitud y esa especial belleza que resulta de la idea de lo útil combinado con lo agradable’ (salubrity, amplitude, and that special kind of beauty that results from combining what is useful and what is pleasant).74 Earlier that same year, the paper had published another article dealing with this process of inter- and cross-cultural exchange. The author was José Fernández Bremón, a frequent contributor to numerous publications, including La Ilustración Española y Americana, La Época, and Blanco y Negro. In his customary fashion, Fernández Bremón relied on humour and satire to grab the reader’s attention. His skewed remarks displayed an acute awareness of the transnational character of urbanisation and the gradual consolidation of the middle classes: Estamos en la edad de los simétrico; las ciudades se tiran a cordel, los edificios tienen todos la altura de las nubes; lo mismo viste el marqués que su criado; merced a los descubrimientos químicos, sólo existen calvos por su gusto. … El descubrimiento de un manolo sería hoy tan notable como el de un megaterio; las razas se han confundido y todo el mundo se parece: el magnate del día y su lacayo tienen cierto airecillo de familia.75 (We are in the age of symmetry; cities are drawn in straight lines, buildings reach the clouds; the marquis and his servant dress the same; thanks to chemical discoveries, bald men only exist by choice. … Discovering a manolo [a cheeky working-class Madrilenian] today would be as noteworthy as ­discovering a

104

Madrid on the move

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

megatherium; everyone is mixed and all and sundry look the same: the tycoon of the day and his lackey share somewhat of a family resemblance.)

Given that urban designers, social commentators, and artists were aware of the urbanisation projects making strides in Madrid and across Europe, the absence of illustrations of demolition and construction becomes even more conspicuous. This absence likely results from several factors. First, there was no real tradition of representing demolition in visual culture. Imagery generally focused on views, monuments, and everyday life except when fulfilling a need for documentary recording. One such exception was in the work of Charles Clifford, the official photographer during the reign of Isabel II, who extensively covered the renovation of the Puerta del Sol and the construction of Madrid’s water channel.76 Conversely, the British illustrated press did give some level of importance to projects of demolition and construction.77 Second, the graphic artists such as Juan Comba and José Luis Pellicer who were employed by established magazines like La Ilustración Española y Americana were charged with reporting on important news events. As a result, less important incidents or sucesos were left to minor artists who may have been on the staff or had the same resources. Third, it is quite possible that artists and draughtsmen truly struggled to capture the visual and sensorial impact of demolition. Among the few ­illustrations of demolition published in the Spanish press was a foreign illustration reprinted in La Ilustración Española y Americana in 1875 under the title ‘Revista Extranjera Ilustrada’ (Foreign illustrated magazine). From 1874 and continuing for the next decade or so, the magazine occasionally published small vignettes of one or two pages representing different events that took place around the world. These images had probably been published beforehand in these countries. Arranged over the centrefold of an 1875 issue were nine pictures of events that had taken place in Paris, New York, Switzerland, London, and Milan. The illustration of Milan showed a somewhat puzzling study of the Piazza del Duomo (figure 2.11). The accompanying text explained that old and impoverished houses had been demolished on the occasion of the German emperor’s visit to the city in order to enable a better view of the cathedral at the Piazza del Duomo.78 The image attempted to convey the clamour of an event of this scope, but it ultimately failed to create the desired visual impact, and the scene is unclear and difficult to read. At this time engraving did not yet permit the swift brushstroke of impressionist painting that might have been able to capture the instant and intensity of the demolition. In the illustration, the cathedral appeared as an indistinct mass hidden behind a cloud of dust that seems to be floating above the buildings. Even if this representation was simply the result of the artist’s lack of dexterity, communicating the emotions prompted by demolition and

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Making modernity 105

2.11  ‘Revista Extranjera Ilustrada. Milán – Preparativos para la recepción del emperador de Alemania: Demolición del Rebecchino, en la plaza del Domo (por la noche)’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 40 (30 October 1875), 277

c­ onstruction was a difficult task for both photographers and graphic artists. Furthermore, one could argue that the vigour and impressiveness of such events was not adequately captured until the advent of cinematography. In fact, demolition was used as an opportunity for experimentation by early cinematographers like the Lumière brothers, who played with the idea of speed and the sheer impact of falling materials.79 While these reasons are more than plausible to explain the absence of depictions of demolition and construction in the Spanish capital, I would like to read further into these absences and explore the associations they may have created. Peter Burke has called these types of omissions ‘significant absences’ that should prompt us to read between the lines and infer what image-makers ‘did not know they knew, or … assumptions they were not aware of holding’.80 So what do these omissions tell us about formulations of the modern? The case of a building called La Equitativa, located on Madrid’s central Calle de Sevilla, is an illustrative example of how ideas regarding urbanisation were articulated in Madrid’s visual culture. In 1878, La Ilustración Española y Americana published a picture of the building project along

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

106

Madrid on the move

with an accompanying text that celebrated the renovation of the area and emphasised the urgent need for renewal projects of this nature in the capital (figure 2.12). The objective of the urban renewal project was to demolish a small alleyway between Calle de Sevilla and the main thoroughfare of Alcalá, giving way to a broad crossway that would enhance the street’s appearance in the fashion of ‘Parisian adornment’. The Spanish architect commissioned to design the project, José Grases Riera, was familiar with the trends in vogue in Paris, and his image followed an early building plan submitted by French architects.81 However, at the time his engraving was published, the renovation of the street was only just under way. The building would not be completed until 1891, more than ten years after the publication of this print. As can be appreciated in a photograph of La Equitativa dating from 1895, the finished building differed significantly from the 1878 illustration (figure 2.13). Rather than articulating an idea of urban change in terms of shock or bewilderment, the 1878 illustration of Calle de Sevilla presented a foreseeable and predictable result – a structure that followed known, foreign models. Illustrated magazines frequently bought the wood blocks they used to print images from their English, German, and French peers, thus making foreign sites and modes of representation accessible to Spanish readers. Madrid’s local illustrated gazette, La Ilustración de Madrid, frequently commented on and critiqued the homogeneity of this process of urbanisation and visual communication. According to one of its articles, virtually all elements related to everyday life were being mechanically produced for the masses and altered ‘según el plano de París’ (according to the layout of Paris) – from train stations, orphanages, and churches to soap and chocolate.82 La Ilustración de Madrid, which had Valeriano Bécquer as its artistic director, was founded by former contributors to El Museo Universal when this predecessor was acquired by Abelardo de Carlos. Driven by its rivalry with La Ilustración Española y Americana, La Ilustración de Madrid was sceptical of certain aspects of urbanisation and technological innovation and denounced its competitor for its speculative methods and its mechanically reproduced foreign engravings.83 However, La Ilustración de Madrid itself reproduced prints that were also featured on the pages of La Ilustración Española y Americana, and the two journals shared many contributors. La Ilustración de Madrid was eventually absorbed by its nemesis, a sign that it could not adapt to the times and survive in an increasingly competitive market. Some of the conflicting attitudes towards industrialisation expressed in the press have been interpreted as signalling an ideological struggle between positivism and idealism, and pointing to larger debates about science and its relation to industry and progress.84 I would argue, though, that these discussions were not only the result of an

Making modernity 107

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



2.12  ‘Proyecto de Ensanche de la Calle de Sevilla: ingreso por la misma por la de Alcalá’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 44 (30 November 1878), 309

Madrid on the move

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

108

2.13  Hauser y Menet, Madrid, Edificio de La Equitativa, 1892. Photograph, collotype. 317 × 254 mm



Making modernity 109

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

ideological debate but also an outcome of an awareness of urbanisation as an international process. Philosophical and scientific discussions, after all, play out very differently in popular culture, where attention was drawn to the effects of industry and reform in everyday life and, more importantly, to the conflicting definitions of newness. The 1878 La Equitativa drawing bears a conspicuous resemblance to an engraving of a Parisian boulevard by French draughtsman Godefroy Durand that had been reproduced in La Ilustración Española y Americana in 1871 (figure 2.14). This resemblance suggests that the circulation of European illustrations allowed readers to become familiar with this sort of structure, further accentuating cross-connections between European periodicals.85 And while Spanish modernisation may at first glance seem to be merely imitative, citizens were managing something of much greater weight here, the implications of taking part in a worldwide process of urbanisation and the realisation that the world was becoming smaller. Accounts of urban regeneration stressed sentiments of continuity rather than rupture or shock and fostered inter- and transcultural understandings of what being modern meant on this new stage. Urbanisation was a fundamental development across the West in the nineteenth century and possibly the first international movement felt from Madrid and Barcelona to Vienna, Naples, and Brussels.86 Although it did not register as a true, complete shock to urban residents, urbanisation’s impact was yet extensive. In making this argument, I follow recent scholarship that has proposed a rethinking of this idea of shock in favour of a more fluid understanding of urban transformation, an approach that ultimately underpins this book. Textual and visual evidence shows that in Madrid, as in other European cities, citizens were deeply aware of the implications of change and negotiated meanings of the present and the past in an informed manner, thereby reducing feelings of threat or shock. This sense of inevitability and predictability was persistent across Madrid’s illustrated print culture, even when it was mixed with scepticism or nostalgia. As chapter 4 will further explore, nostalgia, a sentiment that has proved to be problematic in readings of Spanish modernity, was in fact an essential element of the modernising process and was also present in other European capitals. Self-awareness was a key factor in managing transformation, and its presence allows us to push back on discourses of modernisation framed in terms of rupture or break. In the case of Spain, public debates revolved around adjusting foreign models and articulating vernacular ones. They addressed how the capital might move towards a progressively integrated world system. Urban geographer Jennifer Robinson has talked about ‘creative adaptation’ and notes that forms of urban modernity are borrowed and created everywhere. She shifts the axis of modernity by calling all cities

Madrid on the move

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

110

2.14  Godefroy Durand, ‘Aspecto de los bulevares de París el día de año nuevo antes de la guerra’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 1 (5 January 1871), 13



Making modernity 111

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘ordinary’ – that is, endowed with pertinent innovative aspects as well as challenges – and she therefore dismisses binary notions of innovation/­ imitation.87 Indeed, each capital, region, or nation engages with these issues in specific ways depending on its particular economic and sociopolitical circumstances. However, similarities do arise in the mechanisms used to deal with modernisation, namely the extent to which one did or did not desire to be an actor in a progressively integrated world stage. Because industrialisation occurred at a slower pace in Spain, the subject of awareness has raised a question among historians: could there be an awareness of change in Spain given the fact that there were fewer signs of it? This question, however, contains more than one misreading: Spain did undergo a process of urbanisation similar to that of other European capitals, though at a slower pace. That said, in their desire to understand European standards of modernisation, nineteenth-century chroniclers themselves lamented that Spain was not yet at the level of countries like France or Great Britain.88 Some scholars have argued that this sentiment was a misinterpretation, as recent economic history demonstrates that by the 1880s Spain was practically on a par with some of its neighbours in Northern Europe in terms of production and per capita GDP.89 Yet even if this sense of failure was a ‘collective illusion’, the feelings resulting from this impression may have persisted.90 It is here that the conundrum regarding the issue of awareness of change ultimately rests. Noël Valis and, building on her work, Jesús Cruz have suggested a useful framework that allows us to fathom how awareness of change operated in the Spanish context. The adoption of a different lifestyle and consciousness of being modern could clearly exist even when the economic system was not keeping pace.91 Not only did popular culture discourses exhibit a clear awareness of change, they also underlined the rhetorical devices and visual mechanisms used to define Madrid’s modernisation within a broader world setting. The impact of Haussmann’s model on European urbanisation has persisted well beyond the nineteenth century. The coining of the term ‘haussmannisation’ (which has come to signify nineteenth-century urban transformation) illustrates just how dominant this French model of urban planning has been for contemporary historians.92 The influence of French models can be traced back across centuries.93 Yet the existence of these models does not mean that Madrid’s cultural representations were exclusively imitative or derivative of French typologies. Instead, we must explore how foreign influence and models were perceived and mediated in conjunction with local concerns and preexisting tropes. This perspective sheds light on how modernisation occurred not only in Paris or London but across Europe.94 Visual and urban chroniclers were acutely aware of the trans­ national character of urban renewal, and when describing modernisation they compounded three areas

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

112

Madrid on the move

that put the spotlight on the interdependence of the local and international: the development of standardised, European models of urbanisation; the consolidation of a mass-produced culture; and the rise of a middle class. This viewpoint ultimately undermines national accounts  of modernisation and dismantles the narrative of modernity that places Paris at its core. For Madrid, as for Europe at large, French/foreign paradigms, such as Paris’s pioneering urban projects, were an inspiration and point of reference but not a model to be assimilated directly. The ways in which these foreign forms were diffused and managed exposes how Madrid, like other cities, was itself a site of experimentation where meanings of fashion and taste were articulated as part of a broader worldwide process.

Globally aware Madrileños: Iglesia de las Calatravas and the layers of memory The scale and significance of demolition called for new ways of dealing with change. Recollection played a central role in managing perceptions of local and international transformation in an effective manner. Until the advent of nineteenth-century urbanisation, deliberate destruction on such a scale was unprecedented. Cities only underwent major renovation when they were destroyed by wars or natural disasters, as occurred, for instance, following the earthquakes of Lisbon and Messina, or the great fires of London and Hamburg.95 In contrast, the planned demolition projects of the nineteenth century rendered destruction a calculated, man-made exploit. Urban projects affected citizens on many levels. Memories of the past and feelings that ranged from loss to anticipation were woven into accounts of urban renewal. Overall, what surfaced in printed media was an awareness of an ongoing process of transformation where both foreign and local actors, notions of the present and the past, defined urban spectatorship and lived experience. Modernisation was not perceived or articulated merely as a break from the past or a shocking and traumatic experience. Instead public narratives drew lines of continuity between geographic, cultural, and temporal spaces to describe the ways in which urbanisation did or did not impact people’s lives. In 1870, La Ilustración Española y Americana published an article and illustration that gives insight into how ordinary people, social commentators, and politicians dealt with demolition. The piece related to the imminent demolition of the convent adjacent to the church Iglesia de las Calatravas on Calle de Alcalá, one of Madrid’s main thoroughfares (figure  2.15).96 The origins of this convent date back to 1623, when the Calatrava religious order moved to Madrid before establishing its ­headquarters on Calle de

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Making modernity 113

2.15  ‘El convento de calatravas’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 7 (20 March 1870), 84

Alcalá at the end of the seventeenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, the church had become a well-known landmark in the city, with its dome overlooking one of the capital’s busiest streets. The church, or rather the social interaction that occurred outside the church, was the subject of a variety of visual media throughout the late nineteenth century, appearing in the satirical and illustrated press and photography, as well as in costumbrista and realist literature. The church was damaged in the 1868 revolution, leading to a dispute within General Prim’s progressive government about the state of the building and its potential demolition. The urban designer Fernández de los Ríos had proposed demolishing the church in his 1868 El futuro Madrid (The Future Madrid), in which he stated that ‘demoliciones inútiles son ciertamente lamentables’ (useless demolitions are certainly unfortunate), but that demolitions should be executed if they served the purpose of erecting solid and beautiful buildings that would benefit all the city’s inhabitants, from businessmen and wealthy people to idlers. Among the immediate demolitions he proposed was the Iglesia de las Calatravas in order to open space between Calle de Alcalá and Calle del Caballero de Gracia.97 The issue was eventually taken up by Congress, where it was decided that the convent would be torn down and the church left standing, as part of a larger parliamentary debate about demolitions during the years of the Sexenio Democrático (1868–74). Francisco

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

114

Madrid on the move

Silvela, then a young member of Congress who would eventually come to serve as a conservative prime minister during the Restoration, defended the survival of the convent on three grounds: it was artistically, historically, and religiously relevant. He defended the last point by arguing that in the past few decades three places of worship had already been torn down along Calle de Alcalá.98 The progressive politician Juan Moreno Benítez responded by questioning Calatravas’s artistic and historic significance, and he especially emphasised that it was damaged and underused and that, ‘los edificios que no sirven y que están en los sitios más céntricos deben ir al suelo, porque se compran los solares, y se edifica inmediatamente, y cunde el trabajo’ (buildings that do not work and are located in central locations should be driven to the ground, because the plots are purchased, and construction begins immediately, and work moves forward).99 This kind of reaction to demolition was echoed in other cities. An 1860 article in the New York Times, for instance, stated that, ‘old landmarks are swept away, and even good buildings are pulled down to make room for better. The iconoclastic hand of improvement is everywhere busy and everywhere visible’.100 The attention Congress gave to demolition reveals that urban projects were at the centre of public debates and, furthermore, that the legitimacy of an urban project relied on more than just political support. In order for a project to move forward its supporters needed to prove its purpose, architectural quality, historical and artistic relevance, and financial viability. La Ilustración Española y Americana commented on the political implications of this parliamentary dispute, but its main focus in the 1870 piece on the church was public opinion and the impact the demolition project could have on daily life. Madrid’s inhabitants were familiar with the impact of urban renovation projects. They may have traced the effects of urban reform back to the early nineteenth century and the constructions erected under the Napoleonic rule of José Bonaparte, who was nicknamed ‘rey plazuelas’ (king of little squares) due to his reputation for building squares. Equally eventful were the disentailments carried out under Juan Álvarez Mendizábal in the 1830s and minister of finance Pascual Madoz in the 1850s. The confiscation of ecclesiastical properties these officials oversaw significantly altered the market for land and transferred Church property to private hands or turned it into public space. In addition, the press provided accounts of the innovations concurrently being rehearsed in other European cities. Thus, by the time the planned demolition of Calatravas was proposed, audiences were well aware of the public debates surrounding renovation projects. The article on the demolition of the Calatravas convent was written in the form of a dialogue between the narrator and several anonymous passers-by, a narrative device that established proximity with readers and invited them to engage in the discussion. During the final decades of the



Making modernity 115

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

nineteenth century, the field of journalism was still setting its objectives and defining its limits, a process that was not fully accomplished until the following century. Until then, journalists in Europe shifted between literature and reportage, between creating fiction and disseminating information, and between political discourse and individual opinion.101 This article was illustrative of this pastiche of styles, which was also felt in the field of graphic illustration. The dialogue put the spotlight on emotion and recollection, or in the words of one of the characters in the article, the ‘mixed feelings’ the demolition spurred. The piece showcased the viewpoints held by a range of individuals, from ‘viejecitas’ (little old ladies) concerned about the nuns’ future whereabouts to a bourgeois woman whose opposition had more to do with habit than with politics. Beyond these conventions and the didactic bias of the dialogue, which was sprinkled with historical data on the church’s foundation and architecture, what is noteworthy is that the debate about politics or devotion, albeit not overlooked, was secondary to an effort of a different sort. The piece attempted to define the concepts of the old and obsolete and the new and modern. The participants discussed whether the convent was outmoded and would eventually need to be demolished in order to make way for new homes, or whether it was in fact modern enough, bearing in mind the costly reform carried out just a few years earlier in 1858. One of the bystanders concluded that ‘Aunque me ha convencido usted de que este convento es ya viejo, no por eso dejaré de sentir su demolición’ (Even though you have convinced me that this convent is already old, that does not mean I will not feel sad about its demolition). Thus, despite being old and dilapidated, the church held ‘gratísimos recuerdos y representa los tiempos de la infancia y la memoria de sus mayores’ (fine memories and represented childhood mementos and the recollections of its elderly). The convent was eventually torn down. This text mirrors two fundamental aspects of the period. On the one hand, memory and nostalgia were woven into accounts of demolition, reform, and construction. Furthermore, this insistence on memory, both individual and collective, denoted an active engagement with the cultural discussions of the period. Indeed, the implications of urbanisation for lived experience can only be coherently understood in conjunction with memory and affect. In his 1866 history of Paris, Haussmann himself wrote that ‘the most striking of modern tendencies’ was to look to the past to understand the present and prepare for times to come.102 Curiously, despite the public outcry and heated political discussion leading up to the demolition, the convent’s actual demolition did not receive much press coverage, except for a brief mention of a related fire.103 In 1871, another paper commented that despite the rush to tear down the building, nothing had been done with the plot since, and it continued to be empty.104

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

116

Madrid on the move

The phenomenon of demolition, furthermore, must be understood in the wake of new patterns of consumerism, when commodities were becoming more accessible, and outmoded products seemingly disposable. While monumental in appearance and scale, urban reform was human in its conception and execution and required audiences to tap into their memories to understand the changes they were witnessing. In his study of Paris, Karlheinz Stierele explores the idea of the city as a stratification of different historical periods that materialise in an intangible way in the mindset of the city dweller. In this way, the past materialises and becomes a sort of past present.105 If preexisting structures like the Calatravas convent were demolished, leaving little trace, accounts focusing on memories provided a framework through which to recreate the past and define what urban transformation meant on both a physical and mental level. A question that must be asked, however, is to what extent ordinary citizens experienced urban change and whether urban projects had a direct impact on everyday life. After all, erecting new buildings was a slow and costly procedure that only took up specific portions of the city. Furthermore, new infrastructure coexisted with old streets and buildings, and the urban middle class would have needed to navigate the city’s varied registers. While urban citizens were familiar with the effects of urban change, the lengthy timeframe in which technological advances occurred kept citizens from experiencing a radical or abrupt disjuncture.106 Even if Madrid was not as burdened with demolition in the second half of the century as some texts let on, audiences were aware of urbanisation projects making strides all across Europe.107 However, these transformations were not always assimilated in terms of shock. There was instead a more porous and informed approach to change. The texts and images analysed throughout this chapter reveal that modernisation was negotiated and reworked by means of inward observation, looking backwards to histories and notions of the past, and looking outwards at how innovation was experienced in other nations. As we explored in the introduction of this chapter, moving beyond the narrative of modernisation as rupture brings cross-national communication into the picture. In Madrid, many processes of modernisation were viewed as predictable because they were occurring elsewhere, as was showcased in the press. That the process of urbanisation was happening on an international scale and audiences had access to information on these developments made it less astonishing. In regard to the interdependency that existed between nations, some scholars have argued that a world economy had emerged in Europe by 1500, and by the late nineteenth century it was a fully-fledged capitalist ‘global enterprise’.108 While there was an ­international financial market in the early nineteenth century, it was in the second half of the century that a worldwide commodity market became



Making modernity 117

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

consolidated, cities across the globe imported products from abroad, and nations depended on foreign capital for infrastructure.109 In Spain, this shift towards an economic and financial landscape that integrated regional and European dynamics became evident in the late nineteenth century.110 While this process was uneven and worked to the interests of social elites, what is clear is that the second half of the nineteenth century was a crucial time in grappling what foreign and newness meant. This awareness of one’s place in the world would hereafter alter perceptions of localness too. The accounts examined throughout this chapter are evidence of such instances of awareness and cross-national entanglement. Whether discussing neologisms, fashion, or demolition, social commentators and illustrators situated these processes within Madrid as well as within a broader world setting. Cultural and visual representations of the era attest to an attentiveness to what was at stake at both a local and an international level. Thus, the focus was not so much on urban transformation as a rupture but on ­predictability and inevitability. One author and frequent contributor to the press, Manuel Fernández y González, echoed mixed sentiments regarding European models of progress and industry, and he anticipated one of globalisation’s defining features – homogeneity. In his words, ‘ya todo el mundo sabe decir en las grandes capitales, a poco que tenga ocasión para ellos, tres bien, merci o god night, god morning, wery well’ (now in great capitals everyone knows how to say, whenever they have a chance, tres bien, merci or god night, god morning, wery well [sic]). Fernández acerbically described progress as God’s will, and as a phenomenon so inevitable as to be a distinctive feature of humanity.111 With industrialisation came a more unified and uniform world that also prompted feelings of loss that often assumed the form of nostalgia. Feelings of loss were common and varied, but no one could offer any alternatives to industrialisation, and scepticism was ultimately both a consequence and a symptom of change.112 One of globalisation’s defining characteristics is that it is perceived as ineluctable.113 Furthermore, authors and graphic artists deployed the very modern medium of the press as a vehicle to communicate their concerns about industrialisation’s homogenising effects. What opposing voices did offer, nonetheless, was the possibility of being modern in different ways. At the core of these readings was a persistent and resilient attempt to define how this could be done. Like the characters convening outside the church of Calatravas, illustrators and writers mulled over what it meant to be modern or old in a changing urban landscape, and what definition was fit for the times. One frequent critique of the 1870s and 1880s was in response to the view that something was ‘malo por el mero hecho de ser antiguo, y esto bueno solamente por ser moderno’ (bad just for being old, and good just because it is modern).114

118

Madrid on the move

At the same time, writers noted that lamenting a bygone past was commonplace. As one author wrote in an 1885 article titled ‘Antaño y hogaño. Estudio crítico-social’ (Then and now. Socio-critical study),

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Es achaque muy general, y tanto como general lamentable, hablar mal de los tiempos en que se vive, y poner, en cambio, a gran altura los pasados tiempos, que es como negar implícitamente el progreso constante de la humanidad y las mudanzas que las sociedades y los pueblos experimentan constantemente y siempre casi en dirección a un mayor estado de perfectibilidad.115 (It is a common ailment, both common and deplorable, to speak poorly of the time we live in and to extol, on the other hand, a bygone time, which means implicitly denying the continuous progress of humanity and the changes societies and peoples constantly experience, almost always towards a higher level of perfectibility.)

In addition, because this article was written in the midst of a political reshuffle, it, like other articles of the day, emphasises that the latent defects of society – such as idleness, luxury, or waste – did not result from progress  but on the contrary were, like change, present across historical periods. Authors would frequently highlight points of continuity between the past and the present. Links between different periods were drawn through experience and emotional management of change. These texts show that in the wake of societal transformation, individuals tended to react in similar ways. Writers and chroniclers became increasingly familiar with the debates surrounding modernisation and the fine line they walked when attempting to outline meanings of the modern. Writing in 1874, just months before the Restoration, the writer and progressive politician Fermín Caballero appealed for a more sensible understanding of the old and the modern, and he emphasised that this dispute was not a nineteenth-century affair but a centuries-old reaction to change: En la actualidad el clamor más frecuente, el ¡ay! más agudo es el de las gentes aficionados a lo rancio. … España se ha trastornado y pervertido, dicen; se han corrompido las costumbres, el modo de ser y de vivir es desordenado; cunde el error; gana la impiedad. … El mundo siempre ha sido el mismo, una mezcla de agrio y dulce … de la disputa eterna entre lo antiguo y moderno conviene decir … Yo lo malo condeno, celebro lo que es bueno, y jamás averiguo si es moderno o antiguo.116 (Currently, the most frequent cry, the most piercing ‘oh!’ comes from people who are enthusiasts of staleness. … Spain has become deranged and perverted, they say; customs have been corrupted, the way of living and existing is disorganised; error has spread, impiety wins. … The world has always been the same, a mix of the bitter and the sweet … on the eternal dispute



Making modernity 119 between the old and the modern it is convenient to say … I condemn what is bad, I celebrate what is good, and I never enquire whether it is modern or old.)

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Nineteenth-century accounts reveal that urban reform was understood as a transnational development. Because the world was beginning to be perceived as a more interconnected stage, the importance of place was undermined. At the same time, the conscious creation of connections between the past and the present demonstrates that while transformation probed Madrid’s inhabitants to interrogate urbanisation and European influence, they were not flabbergasted by these processes. On the contrary, they were attentive to the ways in which urban transformation played out in Madrid and influenced the capital’s relation to the past. Thus, conceptualisations of modernity as a rupture or a shock of the ever new become extraneous, pointing to the need to formulate the modern experience from the ­perspective of continuity and awareness. At times urgent and at others tentative, reflections on modernisation ultimately looked forward, even when doing so meant turning back to recast memories or ponder a bygone past. Regardless of the debates that were invariably bound up with industrialisation and the influence of foreign models, the main concern that surfaced in images and texts across European centres was an incessant need to define the modern; what varied were the meanings of progress and how challenges were reconciled and expressed. Retrieving nineteenth-century understandings of modernity and the ways in which artists and chroniclers engaged with the issue sheds light on the nineteenth-century experience itself. Equally important are the implications of these understandings on contemporary scholarship regarding the thorny concept of ‘modernity’. By exploring discussions surrounding words like modernisation and the construction of new terms through the interplay of images and words, it is possible to grasp what the modern experience meant to someone in the nineteenth century. This is an important step in dismantling and decentring modernity as a site-specific phenomenon. Madrid’s visual culture exposes a deep awareness of the modernising process and of the multiple layers of European influence. The assumption that Spanish modernity was backward, resistant, or motivated by a nationmaking discourse seems misguided in light of this ongoing negotiation of meanings and practices. In everyday life, chroniclers, artists, and readers mediated change in multiple ways that moved beyond polarised binaries like those of new/old and foreign/local. Discussions about neologisms, the visual narrative of the skating rink, and the Calatravas debate expose a willingness – both conscious and unconscious, collective and subjective – to assess the modern moment and define it in a fluid manner through both

120

Madrid on the move

familiar and original tropes. Meanings of the modern were not only dictated by linguistic authorities and urban technocrats; they were debated, lived, and constructed on a daily basis.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 For instance, Nead studies modernisation in Victorian London as a process of setbacks and experimentation that illustrators and chroniclers tried to capture. 2 Lawless, Modernity’s Metonyms: Figuring Time in Nineteenth-Century Spanish Stories (Plymouth: Bucknell University Press, 2011). 3 In relation to the Spanish realist novel, Labanyi notes that self-reflexive critiques of realism are fundamental in redefining the genre. Labanyi, Gender and modernization, 388–9. 4 David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 260. Frisby draws from Benjamin’s essay ‘On some motifs in Baudelaire’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 155–200. See Frisby for the influence of these authors in the articulation of the modern urban experience, which has been foundational in later discourses of the modern. 5 May and Thrift, introduction to Timespace, esp. 10. 6 This is, in broad lines, the main contention of Jennifer Robinson’s Ordinary Cities, a study of so-called Third World cities in Asia and Africa during the twentieth century. 7 Andrew Ginger, ‘Spanish modernity revisited: Revisions of the nineteenth century’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 13 (2007), 129. 8 Ginger, Painting and the Turn to Cultural Modernity, 15–16, 315, 318. 9 Schwartz and Przyblyski, ‘Visual culture’s history’, 8–9. 10 Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger, introduction to Daunton and Rieger (eds.), Meanings of Modernity. Britain from the Late Victorian Era to World War II (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 4. More recently, scholars have reflected on Paris’s role as the capital of modernity and proposed new models that examine the nineteenth-century city from a global perspective: Hollis Clayson and André Dombrowski (eds.), Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? Essays on Art and Modernity, 1850–1900 (London: Routledge, 2016). 11 See, for example, Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Anttonen, Tradition through Modernity. 12 Diario de las sesiones de Cortes 88, 1998. 13 On this subject see, Raquel Sánchez García, ‘Morfología del texto y producción de sentido en la lectura’, Ayer, 58 (2005), 84–5. 14 ‘Cabos sueltos’, Gil Blas, 82 (14 July 1867), 4. Gil Blas was a liberal satirical paper published between 1864 and 1872. 15 Elisa Martí-López, Borrowed Words: Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Novel in Spain (London: Associated University



Making modernity 121

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Press, 2000). On this subject also see Marta Giné and Solange Hibbs (eds.), Tradición y cultura. La literatura traducida en la prensa hispánica (1868–98) (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010). 16 Dolores Azorín Fernández and Rosario Baquero Mesa, ‘Los Americanismos en el Nuevo Diccionario de la Lengua Castellana de Vicente Salvá’, in Manuel Ariza Viguera (ed.), Actas del II Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua española (Sevilla: Pabellón de España, 1992), vol. 1, 964. 17 Eugenio Salvá (ed.), Nuevo diccionario de la lengua castellana (Paris: Liberaría de Don Vicente Salvá, 1846), 724. 18 Diccionario de la lengua castellana. La academia española (Madrid: Imprenta Nacional, 1852), 459; Salvá, Nuevo diccionario, 724. 19 Diccionario de la lengua castellana por la Real Academia Española, 13th ed. (Madrid: Imprenta de los Sres. Hernando y compañía, 1899), 997. 20 Francois Choay, The Modern City: Planning in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Marguerite Hugo and George R. Collins (New York: George Braziller, 1969), 7, qtd. in Fraser, Henri Lefebvre, 86. 21 Joan-Anton Sánchez de Juan, ‘La “destrucción creadora”: El lenguaje de la reforma urbana en tres ciudades de la Europa mediterránea a finales del siglo XIX (Marsella, Nápoles y Barcelona)’, Scripta Nova. Revista Electrónica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales, 63 (1 May 2000). Sánchez notes that administrative authori­ ties and technocrats often diminished planners’ social projects. 22 For a study of the shifting meanings of the term progress in nineteenth-century Spain, see Gonzalo Capellán de Miguel, ‘¿Mejora la humanidad? El concepto de progreso en la España liberal’, in Manuel Suárez Cortina (ed.), La redención del pueblo: La cultura progresista en la España liberal (Santander: Universidad de Cantabria, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2006), 41–80. 23 See, for example, María del Pilar Sinués de Marco, El ángel del hogar: Obra moral y recreativa dedicada a la mujer (Madrid: Imprenta Nieto y C.ª, 1859); and Sinués de Marco, Un libro para las damas: Estudios acerca de la educación de la mujer (Madrid: A. de Carlos e Hijo editores, 1875). For a discussion of the female press, see Inmaculada Jiménez Morell, La prensa femenina en España (desde sus orígenes a 1868) (Madrid: Ed. De La Torre, 1992). 24 ‘Aldeta guarnecida de encaje. Núm. 20’, La Moda Elegante Ilustrada, 32 (30 August 1871), 251, italics in the original. 25 Jesús Cruz, The Rise of Middle-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 110. 26 Rebecca Haidt, ‘The wife, the maid, and the woman in the street’, in Catherine M. Jaffe and Elizabeth Franklin Lewis (eds.), Eve’s Enlightenment: Women’s Experience in Spain and Spanish America, 1726–1839 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 145. 27 According to Colette Rabaté, despite Caballero’s conservative ideology, she strove to have control over her oeuvre and paid great attention to the publicising, dissemination, and correct editing of her work, from its typographical aspects to translation errors. ‘El epistolario de Fernán Caballero: la escritura como estrategia vital’, in Pura Fernández and Marie-Linda Ortega (eds.), La

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

122

Madrid on the move

mujer de letras o la letraherida: Discursos y representaciones sobre la mujer escritora en el siglo XIX (Madrid: CSIC, 2008), 303–7. 28 Cruz, The Rise of Middle-Class Culture, 107–9. 29 See for example, ‘Fashion’, Punch (8 July 1893), 3; and ‘Calendario Callejero’, El Mundo Cómico (MUC) (28 December 1895). 30 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayarti Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), esp. 6–18; Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 31 On this subject, see Palenque, ‘Entre periodismo y literatura’. 32 Julio Nombela, ‘El tranvía’, in Eugenio Blasco (ed.), Madrid por dentro y por fuera. Guía de forasteros incautos (Madrid: Administración, 1873), 210. 33 Narciso Campillo, ‘Carta de un andaluz hablador a un madrileño malhablado’, IEA, 48 (30 December 1874), 762. 34 Marta Palenque, ‘Citas, versiones y traducciones en el álbum poético’, in Giné, Palenque, and Goñi (eds.), La recepción de la cultura, 103. 35 Ramón Rodríguez Correa, prologue to Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Cosas que fueron. Cuadros de costumbres, 2nd ed. (1871; Madrid: Imprenta y Fundición de M. Tello, 1882), 25. 36 For examples of some of the terms mentioned here, see Martínez de Velasco, ‘Nueva York – Movimiento en el “Broadway”’; Julio Monreal, ‘Sátira contra los vicios de nuestros días’, IEA, 1884, 371; Gaceta de los caminos de hierro, 11 June 1876; Eduardo Lustonó, ‘La Puerta del Sol’, IEA, 27 (22 July 1882), 42–3; Luis Mariano de Larra, ‘Una conquista’, La Ilustración Artística, 308 (21 November 1887), 308. 37 See Derrida, On Grammatology, 19; and Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), where he used different typefaces and arrangements in columns. Regarding these works, Spivak argues that form carries an additional different set of meanings: Spivak, ‘Review. Glas-Piece: A Compte Rendu’, Diacritics, 7:3 (Autumn 1977), 22–43. 38 Flores, ‘Los gritos de Madrid’, esp. 22–3. Also see, for example, ‘Madrid. La esquina de la Calle de los Peligros’, IEA, 29 (15 December 1870), 464. 39 Íñigo Sánchez Llama, introduction to El copo de nieve (Madrid: Castalia, Instituto de la mujer, 1992), 38–9, qtd. in Leigh Mercer, Urbanism and Urbanity: The Spanish Bourgeois Novel and Contemporary Customs ­(1845–1925) (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 3. 40 Palenque, ‘Entre periodismo y literatura’. In 1876, Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch underscored the absence of a comprehensive history of the journalistic genre; see his Periódicos de Madrid: Tabla cronológica de los incluídos en la obra premiada por la Biblioteca Nacional en el certámen público de 1873 (Madrid: Imp. estereotipia y galvanoplastia de Aribau y Cia, 1876), xviii, x. In 1903, Manuel Ossorio y Bernard compiled an extensive roster of nineteenth-century journalists: Ensayo de un catálogo de periodistas españoles del siglo XIX (Madrid: Imprenta y Litografía de J. Palacios, 1903). 41 Rodríguez Correa, prologue to Alarcón, Cosas que fueron, 25.



Making modernity 123

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

42 Discursos leídos ante la Real Academia Española, 28, qtd. in Palenque, ‘Entre periodismo y literatura’. 43 Ibid. 44 On this subject, see Patricia Mainardi, ‘The invention of comics’, NineteenthCentury Art Worldwide, 6:1 (Spring 2007). 45 Manuel Barrero, ‘Orígenes de la historieta española, 1857–1906’, in Arbor, 187:2 suppl. (2011), 15–42. An early example of vignettes in the Spanish press appeared in La Ilustración in the 1850s in a piece called ‘El dolor de muelas’. On this subject, see Raquel Gutiérrez Sebastián, ‘Usos, tipos, modas y costumbres del medio siglo. El costumbrismo en La Ilustración’, Anales de literatura española, 25 (2013), 203–8. 46 See, for example La Caricatura, 45 (2 September 1885); La Caricatura, 22 (23 March 1885). Mecachis founded this magazine in 1884 before reaching the height of his fame. The fledgling comic strip came into its own in La Caricatura when the different frames of a story became integrated. Mainardi notes this integration as one of the key components of the comic versus successions of frames that could be read in isolation: Another World, 133. 47 Mr Punch on the continong (London: Amalgamated Press, [1904?]), 6. 48 Gilbert Norden, ‘“Passing fashions but no sustainable market”: A history of roller-skating in Austria before 1914’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 16:3 (1999), 76–7. 49 For a discussion of the rise and decline of ice and roller skating in Madrid from the 1870s to the turn of the century, including skating’s relevance as a sport, the names of venues, and its role among different social classes, see my book chapter, ‘Una moda fugaz: El patinaje en la cultura impresa de Madrid a finales del siglo XIX’, in Luis Sazatornil and Antonio Urquízar (eds.), Arte, ciudad y culturas nobiliarias en España (siglos XIV–XIX) (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2019). 50 Kasabal, ‘Cosas de invierno. El manguito’, Blanco y Negro (ByN), 349 (8 January 1898). 51 Emilia Pardo Bazán, El viaje de novios (Madrid: Imprenta de Manuel G. Hernández, 1881), 328. 52 Enrique Sepúlveda, La vida en Madrid en 1887, 3rd ed. (Madrid: Establecimiento tipográfico de Ricardo Fe, 1888), 45–7. For earlier references to melting ice, see ‘Gacetilla de la capital’, El heraldo, 2345 (12 January 1850), 4; ‘Gacetilla’, El popular, 1108 (8 January 1850), 4. 53 Sepúlveda, La vida en Madrid en 1887, 46. Drawing by Juan Comba. 54 This number peaked between 1876 and 1877, coinciding with the opening of a rink at the Teatro de la Bolsa in Madrid. For example, over the course of two days, 29 and 30 April 1877, an advertisement for the rink appeared in half a dozen different papers, including La Correspondencia de España, La Iberia, and El Imparcial. Diario de Avisos de Madrid first made reference to skating on 12 December 1876 in an announcement about the opening of Madrid’s rink. 55 ‘Crónica’, Gaceta de caminos de hierro, 24 (11 June 1876), 379.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

124

Madrid on the move

56 See, for example, ‘Trajes para skating-ring (patinaje con ruedas)’, La moda elegante 10 (14 March 1877), 4. 57 Eusebio Martínez de Velasco, ‘Inventos útiles y curiosos’, IEA, 131 (8 April 1876), 237. 58 Oficina Española de Patentes y Marcas. Privilegio de invención no. 5442, 17 April 1876; this database was assembled in Patricio Sáiz, Base de datos de solicitudes de privilegios. España 1826–1876 (Madrid: OPEM-UAM, 2000). http://historico.opem.es. Also see Rodríguez-Galindo, ‘Una moda fugaz’. 59 Norden, ‘Passing fashions but no sustainable market’, 76–7. 60 See Rodríguez-Galindo, ‘Una moda fugaz’. 61 See, for example, Cleto Zabala, La patinadora: Polka característica para piano (Madrid: Pablo Martín, 1877). A zarzuela entitled Skating-Rink by Benito de Monfort was performed in Madrid in 1879, according to a roster of zarzuelas included in the appendix of Enrique Pérez Escrich, La guerra santa: zarzuela de grande espectáculo en tres cuadros letra de los señores Enrique Pérez Escrich y Luis Mariano de Larra; música de Emilio Arrieta (Madrid: Hijos de A. Gullón Imp. de José Rodríguez, 1879). 62 Madrid Cómico (MC), 188 (25 September 1886), 3, qtd. in Versteeg, Jornaleros de la pluma, 52. See Versteeg for an excellent study of the magazine and its role in forging a modern readership during the Restoration. 63 Versteeg, Jornaleros de la pluma, 51–2. 64 Sepúlveda, La vida en Madrid en 1887, 240. 65 Versteeg, Jornaleros de la pluma, 47, 44. 66 I explored this topic in ‘De paseo: Tracing women’s steps in Madrid’s late nineteenth-century illustrated press’, in Temma Balducci and Heather Belnam Graham (eds.), Women, Femininity and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789–1914 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014), 167–87. On female depictions in the Spanish press and their role in appealing to the male readership, see Charnon-Deutsch, Fictions of the Feminine. 67 See, for example, George du Maurier, ‘Rink to me only with thine eyes’, Punch (18 March 1876), 104. 68 Miguel Ramos Carrión and Mariano Pina Domínguez, Los Madriles: Pasatiempo cómico lírico en dos actos y diez cuadros original de los señores Ramos Carrión y Pina Domínguez; con música de varios maestros (Madrid: Imprenta de José Rodríguez, 1877), 33–41. The musical comedy received praise from both critics and the audience for its mise en scène and buoyancy. See Eduardo Lustonó, ‘Madrid en verano’, Revista de España 224 (May 1877), 548. 69 A list of the sculptures on display was published in Catálogo de la exposición general de bellas artes de 1878 (Madrid: Tiporaf. Estereotipia Perojo, 1878), 85–94. The original negative of the photograph forms part of the Vernacci Archive, held at the Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España, and is registered under various titles. The current catalogue entry is ‘Patinaje, altorrelieve en yeso’; however, an earlier entry listed it under the name Skating Rig [sic]. In the 1878 exhibition catalogue it appeared as Skating Rink. The change in titles



Making modernity 125

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

is indicative of shifting perceptions of the pastime and its associated idiomatic expressions. 70 W. T. J. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 91. On the juxtaposition of images and text in Spanish print culture in the mid-1800s, see Ortega, ‘Imaginar la lectura’, 87–8, 110–11. 71 Dominik Bartmanski, ‘The word/image dualism revisited: Towards an iconic conception of visual culture’, Journal of Sociology, 50:2 (2014), 166–7. 72 See chapter 1. Among the few examples of urban construction was: ‘Madrid. Barrio Salamanca: Nuevas construcciones en la calle Claudio Coello’, IEA, 15 (16 April 1872). 73 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialects of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 89–90. 74 ‘Palacio del Duque de Uceda, en Madrid’, La Ilustración de Madrid, 9 (12 May 1870), 16. 75 José Fernández Bremón, ‘Madrid ha muerto’, La Ilustración de Madrid, 2 (27 January 1870), 4. On Bremón and his use of colloquialisms and satire, see Assunta Polizzi, ‘El humorismo en el discurso periodístico: La “Crónica general” (1884–1904) de José Fernández Bremón’, in Giné, Palenque, and Goñi (eds.), La recepción de la cultura, 54–7. 76 On Clifford, see Lee Fontanella, Clifford en España: Un fotógrafo en la corte de Isabel II (Madrid: El Viso, 1999). There are also anonymous photographs of this urban project; see Gerardo F. Kurtz and Isabel Ortega, 150 años de fotografía en la Biblioteca Nacional. Guía – inventario de los fondos fotográficos (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1989), 187–92. 77 Nead, Victorian Babylon, 34–9. 78 Eusebio Martínez de Velsaco, ‘Nuestros Grabados’, IEA, 40 (30 October 1875), 270. 79 Louis Lumière, Démolition d’un mur (1895–96). 80 Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion, 2001), 188. 81 Navascués, Arquitectura y arquitectos madrileños del siglo XIX (Madrid, Instituto de Estudios Madrileños, 1973), 381. 82 Fernández Bremón, ‘Madrid ha muerto’. 83 La Ilustración de Madrid, 20 (27 October 1870), 1–2. 84 José Manuel Goñi, ‘Ciencia, industria y progreso en La Ilustración Española y Americana’, in Giné, Palenque, and Goñi (eds.), La recepción de la cultura, 469–70. 85 On the cross-national exchange of engravings, see chapter 1. In her study of Ortego’s sketches of the 1860s, Marie-Linda Ortega notes that prints admitted adjustments and variations and were sometimes printed under headings and dates that differed from the original: ‘Ortego, dessine-moi les Espagnols’, in Images et hispanité, Les Cahiers du GRIMH (Lyon: Université Lumière-Lyon, 1998), 327–46. 86 On this subject, see Sánchez de Juan, ‘La “destrucción creadora”’.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

126

Madrid on the move

87 Robinson, Ordinary Cities, 76, qtd. in James C. Fraser, ‘Globalization, development and ordinary cities: A review essay’, Journal of World-Systems Research, 12:1 (July 2006), 192, 194. In line with this theoretical drive, recent studies have repositioned cities like Victorian-era London. See, for example, Tanya Agathocleous, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 88 See, notes 75, 111, and 115 in this chapter. 89 See Goñi, ‘Ciencia, industria y progreso’, 469; James Foreman-Peck and Pedro Lains, ‘European economic development: The core and the southern periphery, 1870–1910’, in Sevket Pamuk and Jeffrey G. Williamson (eds.), The Mediterranean Response to Globalization before 1950 (London: Routledge, 2000), 76–106. 90 Torrecilla, El tiempo y los márgenes, 186–7. 91 Valis, The Culture of Cursilería, 11; Cruz, Rise of Middle-Class Culture, 5–6. 92 Leonardo Benevolo, The European City (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 9. 93 Torrecilla, El tiempo y los márgenes, 24, 54. Torrecilla’s main argument is that Spanish authors, aware of their marginality, reacted to foreign presence by simultaneously rejecting and aligning with French paradigms. 94 Ginger, ‘The modern moment’, 100. 95 Sánchez de Juan, ‘La “destrucción creadora”’. 96 Ricardo Becerra, ‘El convento de las Calatravas’, IEA, 7 (25 March 1870), 86–7. 97 Ángel Fernández de los Ríos, El futuro Madrid (1868; Barcelona, José Batlló, 1975), 88–9, 91. 98 ‘Sesión del miércoles 9 de marzo de 1870’, Diario de sesiones de las Cortes Constituyentes, 10:234 (Madrid: Imprenta de J.A. García, 1870), 6341–2. 99 Ibid., 6344. 100 Nancy D. Munn, ‘The “becoming-past” of places, spacetime and memory in nineteenth-century, pre-Civil War New York’, Suomen Antropologi, 29 (2004), 5. 101 Palenque, ‘Entre periodismo y literatura’, 195. 102 Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, Histoire générale de Paris; collection de documents; fondée avec l’approbation de l’Empereur et publiée sous les auspices du Conseil municipal (Paris: Imprimière Impériale, 1866), 8–9, qtd. in Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 10. 103 ‘Noticias varias’, La Discusión, 513 (9 June 1870), 3. 104 ‘Gacetilla’, La Esperanza, 8136 (22 May 1871). The conservative paper stated that it was quoting La Correspondencia. 105 Karlheinz Stierle, La Capitale des signes. Paris et son discours, trans. Marianne Rocher-Jacquin (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’homme, 2001), 9. 106 Jeremey Stein, ‘Reflections on time, time-space compression and technology in the nineteenth century’, in May and Thrift (eds.), Timespace, 89–105. 107 Virgilio Pinto Crespo has argued that accounts of demolition in Madrid were exaggerated, as modern structures stood beside existing streets and buildings:



Making modernity 127

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘Madrid en 1898: Ciudad, vida cultural e instituciones culturales’, in Actas del XIII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas (Madrid: Editorial Castalia: 2000), 188n8. 108 William I. Robinson, ‘Theories of globalization’, in George Ritzer (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Globalization (London: Blackwell, 2007), 125, ­128–9. 109 Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 2. 110 Luis Enrique Otero Carvajal states that influences, both local and foreign, operated in multiple directions – a phenomenon that came to define the Restoration: Otero Carvajal and Pallol Trigueros, ‘Tradición y m ­ odernidad’, 86. 111 Manuel Fernández y González, ‘Madrid que se va. La fuente de la vecindad’, IEA (10 November 1870), 119–22. 112 On the importance of negation as a symptom of change, see Valis, The Culture of Cursilería, 202. On nostalgia and recollections, see chapter 4. 113 Doreen Massey, For Space (New York: Sage, 2005), 84. 114 Manuel Cañete, ‘Los teatros’, IEA, 32 (8 February 1888), 84. 115 Juan Cervera Bachiller, ‘Antaño y hogaño. Estudio crítico-social’, IEA, 18 (15 May 1885), 291. 116 Fermín Caballero, ‘Aves y consuelos’, IEA, 24 (30 June 1874), 374.

3

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Strolling the city: the flâneur interrupted

Los flaneurs [sic] de París; los partidarios del dolce farniente [sic] de Italia; los indígenas de Filipinas; los fumadores de Oriente y los calmosos americanos, se quedan tamañitos comparados con nuestros diversos e innumerables haraganes. Solo aquí son conocidos los paseantes de la Puerta del Sol, los mirones de los billares, los acompañantes de la parada, los que toman el sol en la Cuesta de la Vega, los que visitan los desmontes del futuro Madrid … a quien yo he conferido el título de Inspector de escaparates. —Manuel Matoses (The flâneurs of Paris, the supporters of Italy’s dolce farniente, the indigenous of the Philippines, the smokers of the Orient, and the sluggish Americans are nothing compared to our diverse and countless idlers. Only here can one find the strollers of the Puerta del Sol, the nosy onlookers at the billiards, the omnibus stop companion, those who sunbathe on the Cuesta de la Vega, those who visit the dismantling works of the future Madrid … I have conferred on them the name of Shop window surveyor.)

The flâneur, an archetype of Parisian life and a symbol of cultural modernity, is a paradigmatic figure. Like the concept of modernity itself, the flâneur has been scrutinised by writers and scholars since the nineteenth century and thus comes with a significant amount of baggage. To a degree, the modern city is associated with qualities customarily ascribed to this social type, such as the flâneur’s sensibility in creating a nexus between space, subjectivity, and language.1 Such is the relevance of the flâneur that it has become something of an analytical model that assists in examining attitudes vis-à-vis the city.2 This chapter explores flânerie from two perspectives: it examines discussions about the flâneur in the Spanish context, and it addresses the ways in which artists and writers described Madrid’s public spaces as arenas that encouraged attentive strolling and social interaction as a conduit through which to experience the city’s changing landscape. Madrid has typically been associated with qualities related to conviviality and sociability. These aspects further complicate the study of the flâneur, as this figure is typically associated with a detached and aloof form of urban



Strolling the city 129

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

observation, so famously constructed by Charles Baudelaire and later revisited by Walter Benjamin. But as this chapter sets out to show, conviviality does not necessarily conflict with observation, spectacle, and urbanisation. We must dismantle the identity of the flâneur, or at least break its ubiquitous link between metropolitan experience and solitary observation. To understand the relevance of these arguments, it is necessary to understand the history of the flâneur. The history and the historiography of this enigmatic figure is one of changes and shifts, from its nineteenth-century origins to its newest and more inclusive versions that encompass women and populations well beyond Paris. The flâneur continues to hold a crucial place in our understanding of nineteenth-century cities and the urban experience. Regarding early conceptualisations of the flâneur, Mary Gluck has distinguished between the ‘popular flâneur’ who emerged in the commercial press and the physiologies of the 1840s, and the ‘avant-garde flâneur’ formulated by Charles Baudelaire in subsequent decades. In contrast to Baudelaire’s elusive flâneur, the popular flâneur was a sociable and key participant in humanising a changing urban landscape.3 Physiologies – short books of social sketches and street scenes – were popular across Europe in the 1840s. A typical volume in this socio-scientific style, Les français peints par euxmêmes (The French described by themselves, 1841), contained a chapter and illustrations devoted to ‘Le flâneur’, and an entire volume was dedicated to this self-absorbed yet sociable type shortly thereafter.4 Writers like Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac also relied on a narrative technique that consisted in embodying the character of the wandering stroller, what Martina Lauster has called a ‘mobile observer’.5 While the popular flâneur disappeared in the 1850s, it lived on as the ‘avant-garde flâneur’, that is, an aloof and anonymous yet attentive urban observer famously articulated by Charles Baudelaire, for whom the archetype epitomised the heroism of modern life.6 In the Spanish-speaking context a similar distinction existed between the ‘flâneur costumbrista’ of the 1830s and 1840s (present in the work of Mesonero Romanos and Mariano José de Larra) and the ‘flâneur modernista’ of the turn of the century.7 In the early decades of the twentieth century, the figure was revisited by Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, and less directly by Georg Simmel, as a method of analysis in exploring the metropolitan experience.8 While in its early, historical phases the flâneur was exclusively male, bourgeois, and Parisian, the scope and reach of the flâneur significantly expanded in the 1880s, coinciding with the cultural turn and the methodological shifts of postmodernism. Scholars have especially attempted to resolve the archetype’s most evident limitations, namely the constraining effects of a figure’s gender and nationality. A large body of work concentrating on women’s experience of public space and the possibility of a flâneuse – the female variant of the flâneur – has since been published.9

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

130

Madrid on the move

The flâneur is part of the discourse of modernity that identified Paris as the crucible of the modern. Just as the literature of modernity is revised and dislocated, so is the archetype of the flâneur as a bourgeois man roaming the streets of Paris. He has been transposed to a variety of urban settings – from Algiers to Prague, Saint Petersburg, London, or Madrid.10 Yet, despite such reassessments of the flâneur, the concept continues to be very much associated with the Baudelaire/Benjamin model, and we must acknowledge Benjamin’s interpretations when attending to the history of the ‘avant-garde flâneur’ and its ties to cultural theory. The flâneur attests to the crossconnections that existed between European print cultures and exposes the devices nineteenth-century writers and artists used to trace connections between the past and the present, and between older aesthetic conventions and contemporary expressions. Not only does the flâneur’s  crossconnectivity enable a dislocation of the experience of the modern but it also demystifies the idea of urbanisation and change as a convulsive experience of the ever new. This chapter does not transpose the Parisian archetype to a different geographic context. Instead, it shows how chroniclers thought about their relationship with public space and continuously redefined what strolling, observation, and sociability meant in relation to local customs and foreign patterns of behaviour. Theirs was not simply a process of resisting some international trends and adopting others; they defined the meanings of cosmopolitanism itself and, in the process, reshaped what authenticity looked like. The archetype of the flâneur was at the centre of discussions among writers and illustrators in Madrid during the nineteenth century. What they questioned was not merely the meaning of the word in Spanish but its relevance when dislocated from the Parisian context and its relation to preexisting modes of walking and sociability in Madrid. Rather than simply adjusting or borrowing the French word, they questioned the meanings of national and cross-cultural practices, and they reformulated understandings of public space by putting the spotlight on the fluidity between the past and present, the local and foreign. The works of these writers thus challenge, once again, the idea that rupture was at the centre of the modern experience. Conviviality and public space were fundamental attributes of Madrid’s identity. The cliché of the Southern European relishing gregarious social settings was one that not even nineteenth-century chroniclers could escape. Accounts – especially of scenes at the emblematic Puerta del Sol – were sprinkled with colourful details, costumbrista-inspired scenes, and cheeky characters. The acts of walking arm in arm, making small talk, and sharing gossip became tropes that artists and authors relied on to describe the capital and foster a sense of belonging. While it is true that these colourful accounts of urban life were a big factor in understandings of Madrid as a



Strolling the city 131

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

convivial city, these accounts did more than offer an appeasing image of the capital. Accounts of the animation of the Puerta del Sol, and by extension the capital, responded to real conditions: the unremitting congestion and overcrowding that existed despite urban renovation, and the great speed at which the capital’s social makeup shifted due to migration. In addition, people in Madrid faced one of the Puerta del Sol’s most enduring problems, even in the twenty-first century – its ambiguity of space as part meeting point, part place of transit, part commercial hub, and part symbolic centre of the capital. Congestion, migration, and overcrowding became attributes of the square and its urban identity, and these attributes were tied up with its sociable and gregarious features, whether real or imagined. It was within this context that formulations of the flâneur, as well as other hybrid and local variants such as the pollo (a cocky and flirtatious young man) and aspiring bourgeois strollers ‘de la high life’ were articulated. The Madrilenian flâneur had antecedents in other social types like the dandi and piri, which appeared in Spanish literature and print culture in the early 1800s.11 During the second half of the century, new types of strollers, like the supercilious high-life stroller, emerged, altering perceptions of public space and cosmopolitanism. This kind of stroller described new patterns of public behaviour, social mobility, and a type of citizen who partook in transnational networks of knowledge and fashion. To feel modern entailed more than imitating French fashions or appropriating foreign words like flâneur or high life. A cosmopolitan was not a worldly person with ­first-hand experience of distant lands but someone who was aware of their place in the world and had the world brought to them, be it through advertisements, periodicals, purchased commodities, or items displayed in shop windows. Discussions surrounding the flâneur and prescriptions on how to experience Madrid’s public spaces showed, overall, an acute awareness of how notions of local practices were being shaped by international ideas of taste, fashion, and public space.

‘So the word doesn’t exist … then we will introduce it’12

In 1848, the popular weekly Semanario Pintoresco Español published an article titled ‘El transeúnte’ (The Passer-by).13 This brief piece was written decades before the debate that arose among writers about the flâneur, and it anticipated two main features that would become predominant in later accounts of public space in Madrid. First, it began with a straightforward question, ‘What is the passer-by?’ and exhibited a clear concern with the qualities required of a stroller within the capital’s changing social, political, and cultural landscape. The article underscored the passer-by’s superior

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

132

Madrid on the move

sense of awareness, sensibility, and urbanity – all of these being characteristics of flâneurs that had been described in 1841 by de Lacroix in Les français peints par eux-mêmes and Huart in Physiologie du flâneur. This concern with defining the observer persisted until the turn of the century and was reformulated in relation to the flâneur’s place in the capital and within a broader European setting. The second element that surfaces in this brief text is the presence of fellow strollers and instances of social interaction, which were expressed through the gestures of the genre of costumbrismo. Chance encounters would become a defining feature of urban identity and public space in Madrid’s late-century print culture. The stroller was commonly depicted as an attentive city dweller who willingly and often decisively engaged in social interaction, an aspect which, at first glance, comes into conflict with a Baudelairian flâneur as an anonymous and vigilant spectator immersed in the crowd. However, as the rest of this chapter sets out to show, companionship and social relations did not seem to hinder the experience of urban observation for the flâneur in Madrid. While passers-by and public space received attention in popular culture discourses from the early 1800s, it was not until the 1870s and 1880s that specific references to the terms flâneur and flânerie became evident. The use of the French word flâneur, or rather the lack of an equivalent term in Spanish, sparked debates in the press in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Journalists pointed to – and sometimes flippantly questioned – the difference between flânerie and the preexisting Spanish words for strolling (pasear) and walking aimlessly about the streets (callejear). As the author Luis Mariano de Larra, the son of Mariano José de Larra, argued in an 1887 article, additional qualities were needed to be a flâneur, an action that was, once again, compared to the activity of paseo: Un borracho es un mal bebedor, así un paseante un mal flâneur. Para flanear se necesita algo más que pasear. Se flanea siempre pensando … se hacen observaciones, se inventan paradojas … se deducen consecuencias, hasta se resuelven problemas. Cualquiera por tonto que sea puede pasearse, pero no todos saben flanear.14 A drunk is a bad drinker in the same way that a stroller is a bad flâneur. To flanear one needs to do something more than stroll. One should flanear always thinking … making observations, inventing paradoxes … deducing consequences, even resolving problems. Any fool can take a walk, but not everyone knows how to flanear.

The author skilfully gave the text momentum by adjusting the French term to Spanish and conjugating the verb according to the vernacular. Furthermore, he stated that in Spain, and especially in Madrid, there had already been distinguished flâneurs, such as Mesonero Romanos. The



Strolling the city 133

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

writer not only was aware of the history of the flâneur but seemed to interpret flânerie as both a narrative device and a mode of strolling. The repetition of the term throughout the article put the spotlight on questions of identity and the implications of adopting not only a foreign term but also a foreign model of behaviour. Understanding the way in which terms like flâneur, pasear, and callejear were used is fundamental in grasping how people understood the act of walking in the nineteenth century. The verb callejear derives from calle, meaning street. Calle indicates a physical location or thoroughfare, but it also has several other connotations. It is a word loaded with emotional significance that can refer to social interaction or an expansive idea of public space. Idioms and expressions including the word calle, such as dejar a uno en la calle (to fire someone) or hacer calle (to make one’s way on a crowded street) were in use as early as 1729 and included in an early dictionary edited by the recently founded Real Academia.15 The definition of the verb callejear was ‘Andar continuamente por la calle de una a otra, sin tener que hacer, ni otro fin, que la curiosidad o el vicio’ (To walk continuously from one street to another, without any aim other than curiosity or vice).16 This definition was used in subsequent editions with changes that appeared to be minor but were in fact significant: curiosity and vice were substituted for ocio (leisure or idleness).17 Explicit references to flânerie and foreign modes of strolling became more persistent in the 1870s and 1880s, and writers reflected on the use of the word flâneur in the Spanish context. The word itself, however, was not assimilated into common Spanish, which sparked discussion among Spanish writers and journalists. Debates surrounding the term must, therefore, be understood in relation to the larger controversy about the adoption of neologisms and the conservative stance of the Real Academia. Within this atmosphere, debates surrounding the term flâneur reached the pages of the press. In 1883, Madrid’s long-running newspaper La Época printed the article ‘Flaneo’ by the Spanish journalist Antonio Hoffmeyer. The article began with the candid sentence: ‘¿Y por qué no? ¿Qué no existe esa palabra en castellano? Pues se introduce’ (And why not? So the word doesn’t exist in Spanish. Then we introduce it).18 This brief article provides a hint of an argument that appeared in the press during these years: that the differences between the idle stroller (paseante or ocioso in Spanish) and the observant flâneur justified the use of the French term. In order to further illustrate the difference between the terms, Hoffmeyer paraphrased and altered the published Spanish translation of Honoré de Balzac’s Physiologie du mariage.19 In previous Spanish editions of the work, the French terms flâneur and flâner had been translated as ocioso (idler, leisurely man) and vaguear (roam) respectively. The journalist, however, adjusted the translation to

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

134

Madrid on the move

further prove his point and strengthen his argument: ‘Pasear es vegetar … flanear es vivir, gozar de la vida, observar las variadas escenas de ese kaleidóscopo que se llama vía pública. … El flaneo es gastronomía de los ojos’ (To stroll is to vegetate … flanear is to live, to enjoy life, to observe the varied scenes of the kaleidoscope that is the urban thoroughfare. … Flaneo is gastronomy for the eyes).20 In line with physiologies’ descriptions of the French archetype, these social commentators stressed sensibility and willingness to observe as the key characteristics separating the flâneur from the ordinary passer-by. To convey the qualities of the flâneur, they opted for manipulating the French word and adapting it to Spanish phonetics and syntax. As one author put it, although Spanish was a rich language, he could not find a word that fully conveyed the meaning of flâner.21 Writers, thus, tried to find new ways to communicate with readers, even if that meant altering both the source and the borrowing language, and so flâneur became flaner, and the verb flanear was conjugated in accordance with Spanish grammar, as in the aforementioned article, ‘Flaneo’. In relation to loanwords in the late twentieth century, linguists distinguish between ‘luxury borrowings’ and ‘necessary borrowings’. A necessary borrowing occurs when a word is borrowed to introduce a concept that has not been coined in the borrowing language, whereas a luxury borrowing introduces an expression for which a word already exists.22 Twenty-first-century lexical borrowings obviously respond to different motivations, but the impetus that drove nineteenth-century writers to reflect on the term flâneur resonates with this divide between forms of borrowing. It was precisely in the late 1800s that linguists became interested in the nature of language contacts and the historical roots and potential of language and grammar to mix.23 What writers in Spain like Hoffmeyer and Luis Mariano de Larra were ultimately weighing up was whether the word flâneur was a luxury or a necessity. Despite journalists’ insistence on the differences between strolling and flanear, the term never appeared on the pages of Spain’s official dictionary. Instead it appeared in the 1927 Diccionario manual ilustrado de la lengua española (Illustrated manual dictionary of the Spanish language), a thesaurus that included local, regional, and foreign words recently incorporated into Spanish. Rather than being an explanatory and illustrated dictionary, as it claimed to be, this volume was somewhat coercive, and it printed alongside certain words the recommended ‘expresión propiamente española’ (properly Spanish expression).24 The verb flanear was included in the first edition of this dictionary, and beside it appeared the accepted and appropriate term to be used in its place: vagar (to roam or be idle) or callejear.25 While some journalists used the French word or its variants, others, like Balzac’s Spanish translator or the urban planner Angel Fernández de los Ríos, employed the accepted term callejear, or even coined new expressions altogether, like



Strolling the city 135

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘recorredor de calles’ (street journeyer) and inspector de escaparates (inspector of shop windows).26 The debate surrounding the term flâneur signalled new attitudes towards public space that were articulated within a context of both internationalism and localism. Nineteenth-century chroniclers did not disassociate the deep-seated tradition of the leisurely paseo from new conceptualisations of urban observation. Instead, they created hybrid words and definitions that demonstrated that a perceived local practice like strolling could be reframed from a new, cross-cultural perspective, and that ­international behaviours were also historically and locally inflected.

Walking arm in arm: the sociable and introspective flâneur

In addition to the discussions surrounding the term flâneur in the Spanish context, visual and literary narratives relied on strolling to describe the changing face of the capital. Journalists penned brief pieces describing the city and its people, texts that were grounded in the tradition of literary costumbrismo of the 1820s and 1830s, wherein authors used the trope of the paseo (stroll) to describe the urban landscape.27 As noted by Margot Versteeg, this style of urban chronicling experienced a resurgence in the final decades of the century in magazines such as Madrid Cómico. Despite retaining many aspects of the flâneur of the 1830s and 1840s, the late-century flâneur of Madrid was not just a ‘historian of customs’, he also conveyed a sense of heroism anchored in the metropolitan experience.28 Indeed, during the last quarter of the century, descriptions of the urban landscape became more nuanced and complicated, and authors shifted their attention to visual practices and foreign influence in a more specific manner. Narrative techniques ranged from describing city space in the first person to acting as an omniscient or invisible storyteller (in the style of Mesonero Romanos’s paseos). Making use of the attentive eye of the flâneur, this type of narrator recounted the social encounters that occurred during the paseo, scrutinising fellow citizens, their conversations and wanderings, and, more importantly, their reactions to modernisation and the impact it had on their trajectories and modes of seeing.29 The serialised piece ‘Los ceros del Juan Araña’ (Juan Araña’s zeros, 1880), for instance, recounted the adventures of an intelligent yet impertinent student by the name of Juan Araña who defied his university lecturers by walking out of the classroom and strolling the streets instead. The author, Peregrín García Cadena, a theatre critic and frequent contributor of La Ilustración Española y Americana, introduced short fragments describing the objects surveyed by the protagonist’s gaze and the emotional responses the landscape triggered. Narrated in the third person, these observations were interwoven within the wider framework of a story. Araña’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

136

Madrid on the move

journey across Madrid was marked not so much by recognisable landmarks but through visually stimulating objects and the twists and turns of the protagonist’s watchful eyes. His gaze could be indifferent and disdainful, attentive and reflective, or even ‘galvanizada por las eléctricas vibraciones del deseo’ (galvanised by the electric vibrations of desire).30 Interest in the mechanics of vision and the involvement of the unconscious became more widespread in the nineteenth century.31 These brief fragments mirrored this growing interest in seeing and put vision and observation at the centre of the urban experience. A distinctive feature of these short journalistic articles was the conflation of solitary observation and social interaction, and so characters in a story became at once introspective and sociable. This attribute was present in the costumbrista writings of Mesonero Romanos and Larra of the 1830s and 1840s, in which strollers typically walked and conversed with a companion.32 In the later decades of the century this form of sociable flânerie coalesced with more ambivalent expressions of introspective observation. Characters became immersed in the stimuli of the city, but their strolls could also be interrupted, either intentionally or not, by a number of elements: noise from the tramway, the cries of street vendors, flirtatious comments, or chance or planned encounters. In short, the interruptions that arose interfered with the anonymity generally attributed to the figure of the flâneur. Huart’s 1841 Physiologies du flâneur had parodied the city walker who called himself a flâneur but then stopped at every corner of Le Marais to engage in banter with the street vendors selling melons. Huart discredited these wanderings as ‘flâneries melonières’.33 Several accounts of walking along the streets of Madrid, in contrast, presented these interruptions as an inherent part of metropolitan existence. Rather than reproaching the aspiring flâneur for falling prey to petty distractions, chroniclers often presented social interaction as an attribute of city life that strollers either engaged in or had to consciously avoid if they wished to go on a solitary walk.34 Visual and literary descriptions of Madrid’s landscape presented social encounters as a defining element of urban life, and characters were portrayed as actively engaging with fellow citizens in public space. This ebullient character was a feature of other Spanish centres like Cádiz and coexisted alongside elements of cosmopolitanism and foreign influence.35 Deborah Parsons has insightfully argued that the trivial and the quotidian were fundamental components of modernist aesthetics in early twentiethcentury Madrid.36 This quality was evident from the nineteenth century and manifested itself in these sociable encounters that were such a predominant feature of Madrid’s popular print culture. Building on the technique of the costumbrista omniscient narrator, a brief article by the author and frequent contributor to the press Ricardo



Strolling the city 137

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Sepúlveda is an example of how narratives of sociable flânerie were constructed. The author conducts a socio-spatial survey of Madrid that begins at the Carrera de San Jerónimo in the vicinity of the central Puerta del Sol, passes through the northern neighbourhood of Barrio de Pozas, and concludes at the recently created Barrio de Salamanca.37 In this text, titled ‘Cróquis’ (Sketch, 1876), social encounters serve as an instrument of navigation and create a sense of proximity with the reader. The narrator begins his stroll by eavesdropping on a conversation between public employees, which captures his attention until he sees a young, affectionate couple pretending to have met by chance. Scrutinising their actions, the author watches as they compose their ‘novela en las aceras’ (novel on the sidewalks), quickening or slowing their pace in order to match the tempo of the city as well as their own disposition. This brief passage recalls spatial theorist Michel de Certeau’s notion that city space is constructed as a ‘chorus of idle footsteps’. The footsteps of a city’s pedestrians could shape perceptions of practised space, create trajectories, and ultimately shape ideas of public life beyond the planned intentions of urban design.38 Sepúlveda’s narrator then makes his way to Barrio de Pozas, where he follows a woman who walks hurriedly and then stops to chat with a conventionalised yet updated street type, ‘el portero’ (the doorman). The doorman informs the woman that an acquaintance of hers has gone ‘al otro barrio’ (to the other neighbourhood), an idiom used in Spanish to refer to the deceased, similar to the English expression ‘the other side’. Witnessing the woman’s distress, the doorman then clarifies that by other side, he means the other side of town – the capital’s new residential neighbourhood Barrio de Salamanca. Rather than being a mere remnant of the costumbrista stroll, this article – much as Versteeg observes – blends the proximity of the curious voyeur with a sense of boldness reminiscent of Baudelaire’s work.39 Short encounters such as these presented a blueprint of the city and provided a vivid record of social and spatial change that merged aloof observation with social interaction. The satirical press relied heavily on social encounters and small talk to describe the changing urban and social landscape. Fortuitous meetings between two or more characters were customarily accompanied by brief captions of three or four lines that reproduced the characters’ dialogue. Two examples of this sort of piece (published, respectively, in 1873 in El Mundo Cómico and in 1875 in El Solfeo) showcase how the trope of small talk was used to draw attention to a specific topic and at the same time comment on the act of gossiping itself. The titles of the pieces, ‘Las chismosas’ (The gossipers) and ‘Doble sorpresa’ (Double surprise) from El Mundo Cómico (figure 3.1), and ‘Reunión de los notables … de mi pueblo’ (A meeting of dignitaries … from my town) from El Solfeo, emphasised the informal tone and tittle-tattle between participants.40 Throughout the 1880s, the

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

138

Madrid on the move

3.1  Clockwise, Manuel Luque, ‘Las chismosas’ and Josep Lluís Pellicer, ‘Doble Sorpresa’, El Mundo Cómico, 16 (16 February 1873), 3–4

comic press took this penchant for gossip one step further and even featured regular visual sequences, such as Mecachis’s ‘Hablillas’ (Rumours), published in La Caricatura, and the columns ‘Paliques’ (Chitchats) and ‘Chismes y cuentos’ (Gossip and stories), featured in Madrid Cómico. The popularity of these columns mirrored the vital role that magazines ascribed to gossip as part of Madrilenian public life.41 These sections consisted of a few brief sentences and emulated the sort of hurried small talk that occurred during chance encounters or brief conversations. Gossip also featured in the titles of satirical magazines, as was the case of the short-lived weekly Madrid Chismoso (Gossiping Madrid). Founded in 1885 under the artistic direction of the well-known caricaturist Ramón Cilla, the gazette was modelled after the already popular Madrid Cómico. This magazine included sections like ‘Chismografía’ (a play on words, roughly translating as ‘gossipography’), which was reprised in magazines like Blanco y Negro at the turn of the century.42 Inspired by Madrid Cómico, Madrid Chismoso also featured a double-page centrefold under the heading ‘Madrid chismoso’ that comprised a sequence of frames depicting social encounters, street

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Strolling the city 139

3.2  Ramón Cilla, ‘Madrid chismoso. De regreso’, Madrid Chismoso, 18 (17 September 1885)

scenes, and snippets of conversation between groups of two or more people (figure 3.2). The influence and risks of gossip was visible across printed media of the period. Realist novelists reflected on the grasp of idle talk and its ability to mould female conduct and determine a woman’s public reputation.43 Reproducing brief conversations through texts, images, and the combination of the two, therefore, was not only a comical recourse. It was a convention that encouraged citizens to reflect on the relationship between public space and sociability. Graphic artists and chroniclers emphasised and banked on this combination of urban change and sociability. The 1869 article ‘Paseos de Madrid’ (Madrid’s promenades), for example, stated that like other major capitals including Berlin, Saint Petersburg, Paris, and London, Madrid boasted pleasant boulevards and promenades that allowed residents to stroll and invigorate their imagination. However, Madrid’s distinctiveness lay in its perceived conviviality – a quality, according to the article, commonly associated with smaller, provincial towns. Where Parisians strolled for the sake of strolling, madrileños also went on a walk with the hope of running into acquaintances.44 The aimless wandering of the flâneur was superseded by a more sociable approach to strolling. In line with costumbrista style, the author recreated several dialogues (or ‘stereotyped dialogues’, as he termed

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

140

Madrid on the move

them) in order to enact the chance encounters that took place among the urban archetypes populating the city. This technique was common to texts and illustrations of the time, and it highlighted the interdependency of individual and collective experience. While references to collective strolling or flânerie à deux were not necessarily unique to Madrid, also occurring in texts from cities in Northern Europe, the author of ‘Paseos de Madrid’ attempted to prove that Madrid’s sociable inhabitants made the city unique.45 Visual and social chroniclers presented sociable forms of strolling as a distinctive feature of Madrid’s public life. They experimented with hybrid typologies combining conviviality and observation and coherently tied the flâneur and the public practice of flânerie to communal experience and preexisting social practices. The famed writer and playwright Jacinto Benavente captured the hybrid nature of flânerie. In a brief article titled ‘Confidencias’ (Secrets), Benavente described how two friends aimlessly walked around the city arm in arm, their manner of speaking mirroring the slow stream of consciousness associated with reflective observation: ‘Pasean del brazo por calles y calles, sin dirección fija. … Hablan con lentitud, con dejadez del pensamiento’ (They walk arm in arm along streets and streets, with no particular destination. … They speak slowly, with an aloofness of thought). And, as the main character specifies, provided that the weather cooperates, ‘flaneo, solo o con el primer amigo que encuentro’ (I flaneo on my own or with the first friend I come across).46 Flânerie is, to a certain extent, trivialised in the article, as the two characters are ordinary men who go by the common names of Pepe and Manuel. In writings like ‘Confidencias’, flânerie ceased to be an end in itself and became a source of enjoyment as well as a social and sociable practice. Through the motifs of costumbrismo, the flâneur’s reflectiveness was intertwined with the colourful and cheeky elements of small talk and social interaction. One did not cancel out the other. Walter Benjamin briefly contemplated the possibility of a Roman flâneur. Benjamin believed that this figure could not exist in a city like Rome where the passer-by inevitably became involved in the mnemonic characteristics of his surroundings. The national character of the Italians, as well as the city’s ‘reminiscences, historical frissons’ – its squares, churches, and national shrines – seemed to conflict with his existence.47 As evidenced in other writings, Benjamin struggled to comprehend urban experience in Southern Europe. In 1924, he visited Naples and was staggered by the city’s ebullient character. In a brief essay, he presented a city where the private sphere extended to balconies and was emmeshed with public space in a way hitherto unknown to him.48 According to Howard Caygill, Naples offered a third category of urban experience linked to the modern – porosity.49 In these settings Benjamin was compelled to rethink conceptions of urban modernity in a



Strolling the city 141

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

space that required a willingness to interact with the crowd.50 Southern cities made Benjamin aware of the limits of his own framework of modern urban experience, a framework that would prove foundational to theorisations of modernity. The nineteenth-century urbanist Fernández de los Ríos even commented on the way in which the underprivileged classes transformed leisure spaces like the café into a ‘sucursal de su casa’ (a branch of their homes).51 Fernández de los Ríos’s critical comments, driven by his aspirations to transform and modernise Madrid’s landscape, indicate that the public and private divide was being renegotiated in the context of urbanisation. Benjamin identified the tricky issue of locating the aloof and solitary flâneur within a Southern European landscape. Yet the crux of the issue may lie in the motivations and mechanisms that made urban observation possible in the first place. In this sense, spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre’s analysis (or rhythmanalysis, as he called it) of Mediterranean cities provides a framework that helps bridge the gap between introspective urban observations and the presence of what Benjamin termed ‘historical frissons’. Lefebvre suggested that in Mediterranean cities historical circumstances and rituals merged with the rhythms of everyday life, and that, rather than merely representing an imposition, these disruptive elements or ‘persistences’ could reshape notions of public space.52 Perhaps one of the most intriguing approaches to urban space in a southern setting is Jonathan Crary’s brief analysis of Rome’s Piazza Colonna at the turn of the twentieth century. According to Crary, in this space individual and collective subjectivity took shape in a ‘multiplicity of images, sounds, crowds, vectors, pathways, and information’ that rests outside the ‘Baudelaire/Simmel tradition of shock-ridden inner life’ or the preferred arena of the anonymous and aloof ‘post-Haussmann flâneur’.53 While the main theme of Crary’s book is the nature of modern attentiveness, his brief look at the Roman square provides a framework in which sociability and urban observation coexist and thrive. What nineteenth-century visual and social chroniclers ultimately spoke of, either deliberately or indirectly, was the inadequacy of the binary divide between private and public, collectivity and individualism, to describe lived experience. Instead, they explored alternative categories of hybridity and porosity to define the ways in which citizens experienced and negotiated space in their daily lives.

Calculating sociability: Puerta del Sol, small talk, and a sense of belonging Madrid was rendered as a site where the old and the new, sociability and individual experience, coalesced – a hybridity of historical remembrances

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

142

Madrid on the move

and modern stimuli that permeated everyday life. But to what extent was Madrid truly a sociable place? And in what ways did the city’s reputation skew perceptions of public space? To adequately understand representations of public space, we must overcome the notion that sociability was just an expression of costumbrismo or traditional culture, or that it was incompatible with introspective observation and international trends. The historian José Luis Guereña has described the slippery concept of sociability as a composite of multiple aspects connected to the quotidian, everyday life, and a collective psychology.54 If discerning the limits between ­representation and reality is already a difficult task, it is complicated by the lack of definition of journalism’s aims during this period and by texts and illustrations that moved between fiction and reportage, borrowing from a number of registers.55 However, shifts in demographics, social mobility, and the city’s design suggest that central squares like the Puerta del Sol were indeed sites that fostered collectivity. Perceptions of sociability were associated with a variety of environmental, financial, and work-related factors ranging from the climate to familial ties and migration.56 Although Spain advanced towards a centralised liberal system during the Restoration, the success of enterprises undertaken by people across the social spectrum, from recent newcomers in search of employment to more established families, relied heavily on ties of kinship.57 Our readings of the past are informed, after all, by the concerns that nineteenth-century chroniclers emphasised in their texts, and it is precisely these concerns that shed light on their experience of public life. In the words of historian Noël Valis, what ultimately remains are the ‘resonances left behind’.58 Madrid’s main square, the Puerta del Sol, encapsulated ideas of sociability, urban change, and the shifting boundaries between public and private life. Referred to as a mentidero (place for meeting and gossiping), the square was also the capital’s financial, commercial, and political hub due its proximity to the city’s main institutions as well as businesses and cafés. Because of its location and significance in public life, the Puerta del Sol underwent a major renovation in the 1850s. Despite this facelift, the square retained its reputation as a mentidero frequented by a range of social types and classes, and the surrounding streets remained congested. Literary and public narratives reflected on the square’s reputation as a mentidero and compared it to other spaces of bourgeois sociability like the Paseo del Prado. Social commentators were aware of the square’s notoriety for being gregarious and lively and reflected on the stereotypes that resulted from these widespread beliefs.59 Their accounts oscillated between decrying the square’s overcrowding and celebrating its conviviality, which was understood to be a part of Madrid’s identity. What seeps through these visual and literary accounts of the Puerta del Sol is a somewhat conflicting



Strolling the city 143

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

image of the square as a site where social life, observation, and individual subjectivity converged. As a result, what to do with the Puerta del Sol and how to improve its appearance became something of a conundrum in the nineteenth century. The square embodied the city’s local identity and at the same time was a reminder of several aspects that called for improvement. In 1863, the Junta de Estadística, a forerunner of the modern-day National Institute of Statistics, tackled these issues and conducted a survey of the Puerta del Sol with the objective of calculating the exact number of carriages and horsemen that circulated through and around the square. This council of statistics was created in the spirit of gathering the geographic and demographic statistics of Spain and its territories, and it reflected a greater European interest in statistics during the second half of the nineteenth century, as evidenced by the proliferation of societies, international conferences, and specialised publications, such as Spain’s monthly Revista General de Estadística (General journal of statistics, launched in 1862). Time, space, and communication underwent a process of global unification in this era. The 1860s and 1870s witnessed the creation of international standards of clock time, a transatlantic and unified postal system, and the standardisation of the field of statistics.60 Spain’s Revista General de Estadística recounted events like the International Conference of Statistics held in Berlin in 1863 with great detail and emphasised the importance of sharing and unifying methods across countries.61 And so, the impetus to calculate whether the Puerta del Sol was congested echoed developments occurring in other parts of Europe in the fields of statistics and urbanisation as specialists devised unified methods to record change. While national institutes played a key role in disseminating scientific information, they did much more than that. For instance, the April 1863 issue of Revista General de Estadística provided information on a variety of subjects from the age of marriages and mental illnesses by country to a survey of the number of Europeans living in Canada. Its analysis of the Puerta del Sol compared traffic in Madrid’s public square to London’s Fleet Street.62 The results of the study were published in the April 1863 issue under the title ‘Movimiento de Londres y de Madrid’ (Movement in London and Madrid) and were reprinted in the daily newspaper La Época the following month.63 Comparison became a common epistemic tool in the final decades of the nineteenth century and was made possible by new forms of global communication, such as affordable publications that disseminated information about the achievements of other societies.64 The study of the Puerta del Sol estimated that an average of 23,875 carriages and horsemen circulated through the Puerta del Sol’s nine entrances each day. It identified ten different types of wheeled vehicles, including wagons, horse traps, twoand four-wheeled horse-drawn carriages, stagecoaches, and omnibuses. The

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

144

Madrid on the move

report concluded that movement in the British and Spanish capitals was almost five times higher than in Madrid, though it did not specify each city’s demographics or explain whether these numbers were absolute or relative. In addition to garnering unprecedented statistical information on the Puerta del Sol’s traffic, the study is indicative of changing notions of flow and circulation. Not only did it present a comparison of digits and results, it articulated a new understanding of circulation that was bound to statistical advances, on the one hand, and experiences of movement in foreign capitals, on the other. This link between circulation and commodities was also conveyed in illustrations that depicted the carriage as a new marker of social status and an opportunity to display one’s wealth in public space.65 More pressing than the congestion of carriage traffic was the sheer number of citizens that convened at and around the square, from leisurely strollers to idle passers-by or street buskers. As early as 1841, Madrid’s municipal police issued an order urging people not to remain standing on the sidewalks of the Puerta del Sol and its surrounding streets of Carretas, Montera, Preciados, Mayor, Arenal, and Carrera de San Jerónimo. The stated objective of this order was to improve the comfort and well-being of the capital.66 Although this command was issued before the Puerta del Sol was remodelled in the 1850s, the urban planner and author Ángel Fernández de los Ríos revisited the municipal order in his influential book El futuro Madrid (1868). De los Ríos’s body of work was dedicated to Madrid’s urbanisation projects and changing social landscape. In El futuro Madrid and the subsequent Guía de Madrid (Guide of Madrid, 1876), he described different ways to remodel Madrid following the urbanisation projects he witnessed during his exile in Paris prior to the 1868 revolution. El futuro Madrid, which was published with the evocative subtitle Paseos mentales (Mental strolls), tackled prospective urbanisation projects and showcased innovative methods of explaining the dynamics of city space in the nineteenth century. Among the many issues he examined were the effects of social congregation and the public role of the Puerta del Sol. While he envisioned Madrid’s urbanisation in light of processes occurring outside Spain, he did not disregard local idiosyncrasies, longstanding customs, and the geographic and physical elements of Madrid’s landscape. To the author, the Puerta del Sol fulfilled an essential role as at once a public space intended for leisure and a site to convene and socialise in a more intimate manner. Although the square was a public space, it also afforded moments of intimacy and respite away from the home. The author described these practices as ‘purely Spanish’ and equated the public square with an ancient forum. In this sense, it created a sense of civic belonging that was cushioned in semiprivate practices and functioned as both an arena in which to test urban projects and foreign models and



Strolling the city 145

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

as a site a­ ssociated with long-established local customs and familiarity. Another writer, Eugenio de Ochoa, was more critical of Madrid’s convivial atmosphere and the informal tone used to address fellow citizens – ­especially women, who were addressed as ‘la Inés’ or ‘la de tal’ (lady so and so) – which he considered irreverent when compared to the practice in other European capitals such as Paris or London.67 Regardless of whether small talk and informal manners were Madrilenian traits or represented a real hazard to the city’s circulation, what is clear is that the subject of sociability captured the attention of urban chroniclers and journalists alike and was used as a trope through which to communicate concerns about circulation, public practices, and demographic shifts. The perceived convivial atmosphere that was the hallmark of the Puerta del Sol therefore owed to the circulation of carriages, people, and goods as well as to the debates and discussions that perpetuated or contested this image. But there was another crucial factor – the diversity of the pedestrians (in terms of class and place of origin) circulating in the area. The residential district Ensanche was envisioned by the civil engineer Carlos María de Castro in 1860 as a way to expand the city limits, alleviate congestion, and create new residences for the capital’s middle and upper classes. This process was, however, slow. The middle classes proved reluctant to move to the residential neighbourhoods of the Ensanche, a reluctance that was captured by novelists like Benito Pérez Galdós and Armando Palacio Valdés, whose characters saw the new districts as too remote and dull and who likened the Barrio de Salamanca to the countryside.68 This portrayal of the middle class highlighted its inclination to cling to habits and customs but also emphasised the importance of everyday practices like running errands, going to Mass, or taking a stroll in the city’s historic centre. While the most underprivileged classes lived in segregated districts on the outskirts of the city, by 1905 lower- to upper-middle-class households were mixed in the neighbourhoods north and southwest of the city centre. Furthermore,  these mixed middle-class areas were immediately adjacent to the high-income areas located at and around the commercial streets of Alcalá, San Jerónimo and the Puerta del Sol, and Barrio de Salamanca.69 Thus, by the 1930s, the city was a mosaic of diversified nuclei that, nonetheless, remained interdependent, with communication between them being key to the city’s productivity.70 Furthermore, immigration drastically increased throughout these decades. Between 1860 and 1930, the metropolitan area of Madrid received over 50 per cent of the country’s total immigration, followed by Catalonia and the Basque Country with approximately 21 per cent each. By 1930, immigrants accounted for 55 per cent of the population of greater Madrid.71 This statistic suggests that at the turn of the century, the city centre remained socially mixed and continued to

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

146

Madrid on the move

f­unction as a commercial hub at the crossroads of socially, economically, and regionally diverse neighbourhoods. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s the draughtsman José Luis Pellicer represented the Puerta del Sol on various occasions for different illustrated weeklies – from his satirical sketches of the square, printed in magazines like El Solfeo and El Mundo Cómico, to his more elaborate centrefolds executed for La Ilustración Española y Americana.72 Pellicer customarily highlighted the convergence and contrast of multiple social types and classes and at the same time portrayed the Puerta del Sol as a site of rehearsal for urban development projects like public electric lighting.73 Social chronicler and journalist Eduardo Lustonó also highlighted the variegated mix of people that congregated at the square depending on the time of day and its changing appearance, owing to both modern infrastructure and international trends. In 1882, he wrote: En Madrid el centro militar, por decirlo así, está en la Plaza Mayor; pero el verdadero centro, el rendez-vous d’honneur de los amantes contemplativos de la Naturaleza es la Puerta del Sol. En la Puerta del Sol, según los diferentes sitios y hora que se escojan, se encuentran modelos de todas las especies de sus moradores, varones y hembras, y hasta femeninos, como decía aquel mozo, alegando una excepción para librarse del servicio militar. … Entre la Puerta del Sol del Buen Suceso y la de los tranvías media un abismo: setenta años separan a la Mariblanca del surtidor moderno. Hoy la Puerta del Sol parece el patio de un hotel de París más que el punto céntrico de la capital. Sin embargo, entre aquel tipo español puro, aunque nos esté mal decirlo, que ofrecía la Puerta del Sol hace algunos años, y el que actualmente ofrece, opto por el segundo.74 (In Madrid the military centre, to put it one way, is at the Plaza Mayor, but the true centre, the rendez-vous d’honneur [honourable rendezvous] for contemplative admirers of Nature, is the Puerta del Sol. At the Puerta del Sol, depending on where and what time you choose to go, you will find all types and species of denizens, men and women, and even femininos [effeminates], as one lad put it, claiming this exception to get out of military service. … Between the Puerta del Sol of the Buen Suceso and [the square] of tramways lies an abyss: seventy years separate Mariblanca from the modern water supply. Today the Puerta del Sol looks more like the court of a hotel in Paris than like the capital’s most central location. However, even if it is wrong to say, between that pure Spanish type that the Puerta del Sol offered some years ago, and the one it offers today, I prefer the second.)

In an 1876 centrefold for La Ilustración Española y Americana (figure 3.3), Pellicer depicted just this sort of appeasing and colourful melange of social classes. The centrefold presented the square as a microcosm of the city, including well-to-do bourgeois men and women dressed in the latest

Strolling the city 147

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



3.3  Josep Lluís Pellicer, ‘Escenas matritenses. Una acera de la Puerta del Sol al anochecer’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 17 (8 May 1876), 304–5

f­ ashions, an ambitious milliner or seamstress coyly avoiding the stares of a cheeky man, and members of the popular classes dressed in traditional and weathered garb. The common thread that runs through the illustration is not class difference but the tempo of city life, as marked by social interactions across (though not among) social classes. That is, as was common practice in satirical centrefolds, it shows inhabitants of different social backgrounds engaging in similar activities with members of their own class but not intermingling with members of the other classes. The backdrop of the square was a contemporary landscape of kiosks, printed media, lighting, and public transportation. The text that accompanied this image, written by the magazine’s editor Eusebio Martínez de Velasco, adopted a conservative slant and did not refer to Pellicer’s allusions to class. Instead it exaggerated the square’s importance as an international landmark representing the country’s past glory and its potential to captivate people in Spain and across the globe. This brief text not only idealises the square, it foregrounds the square’s reputation in the past (by seeking validation in historical events and the writings of Mesonero Romanos, one of Madrid’s most famous chroniclers) and highlights the square’s semiprivate nature and its importance as an unfinished project or place in continuous flux, able to alter identities and shape present-day aspirations. Rather than being guided by

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

148

Madrid on the move

simple laws of efficiency, the tempo of city life was marked by sociability, metaphor, and everyday rituals that were at once rooted in the past and fuelled by modernisation. In addition to drawing attention to the Puerta del Sol’s role in public space, chroniclers of the period reflected on recollections of the square and its relationship with local identity and memory. The square was not just a physical space but a mental one that drew on the collective memory of the city’s inhabitants. In Viaje crítico alrededor de la Puerta del Sol (Critical journey around the Puerta del Sol, 1874), author and journalist Manuel Ossorio y Bernard drew attention to the mental images and memories the square triggered. Like other writers of the time, Ossorio attempted to define the hybridity that the Puerta del Sol represented in people’s memory: a pastiche of the old and the new, of high and popular culture, of local practices and innovative universal models of urbanisation. To Ossorio, the Puerta del Sol not only indexed the capital’s past achievements and present shortcomings but ‘was Madrid’.75 Audiences viewed the square as a source of pride, due its ties to local customs and long-standing practices; as a reminder of aspects that called for improvement; and more often than not, as an entangled place where multiple feelings and memories coalesced. It was a mental and physical place that fused collective memories with more pragmatic aspirations linked to improvement and international standards of urbanity. The relationship between collective memory and urban development has emerged as a subject of scholarly enquiry, and in this sense, the Puerta del Sol serves as a clear example of a place where remembrance and urban renovation played out.76 Notions of the square were inseparable from shared memories and perceptions of sociability – but this link was not a burden or an obstacle in the way of urban change. Instead, shared memories were a perpetual presence and link to what Pierre Nora called the ‘eternal present’ within the continuous interplay between history and memory.77 As Ann Rigney has argued, for memory to become collective, acts of communication and representation need to draw on a pool of remembrances and common points of reference that solidify the relationship between individual and societal memory.78 Visual and cultural representations of the Puerta del Sol fed on a repository of shared memories and produced an image of the square as a place where affect and pragmatism, localness and cosmopolitanism intersected. Collective memories of the Puerta del Sol not only shaped ideas of the past and present but also revealed how citizens negotiated foreign places, as is made visible in postcard correspondence of the era. The visual–verbal dynamics of any illustration are crucial in understanding how that image was perceived and mediated. Postcards offered not only the printed caption but an added and equally potent notation: the written message of the

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Strolling the city 149

3.4  ‘Nelson’s Column & Trafalgar Square London’, postcard sent in 1906. Collection Familia Osorio y Martos, Condes de la Corzana

sender.79 During the early twentieth century, senders of postcards wrote brief sentences describing the image printed on the postcard as well as the emotions and memories triggered by the place in the image. These messages were brief, limited to the small blank space on the postcard’s reverse. A postcard of Trafalgar Square sent by a Spanish woman to an acquaintance in 1906 described the square in typically clipped sentences (figure 3.4). The imposing Trafalgar Square, one of London’s main landmarks, was described by the sender as ‘La Puerta del Sol de Londres’ (London’s Puerta del Sol). This postcard is representative of the hold that Madrid’s square had over collective and visual memory and its potential to act as a point of reference that allowed audiences to make sense of both local and foreign public spaces.

Flâneurs, pollos, and high-life strollers

Discussions surrounding public space, sociability, and the flâneur formed part of a broader debate regarding class, consumption, and international fashion. In the Spanish context, the flâneur was closely linked to other character types like the dandy and pollo (lit. chicken, a colloquial expression referring to young cocky men), and to instances of what some commentators called ‘high life’. The expression ‘high life’ made its first appearance

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

150

Madrid on the move

in the Spanish press in the mid-1860s and continued to appear in newspapers, novels, advertisements, and business names in Madrid throughout the final decades of the century.80 It was used to describe Madrid’s upper classes and was an easy way to identify and pinpoint this social group. At the same time, it served as a label to parody the ambitions of an aspiring bourgeoisie and passing trends. During the nineteenth century, contemptuous expressions that put the spotlight on new urban classes and patterns of consumption emerged. The term cursi was used for an incipient middle class that attempted to emulate the higher echelons of society by displaying its wealth,81 at a time when a solid culture of consumerism of material objects and household items among Spain’s middle class was being consolidated.82 Similar to cursi, high life evoked new international styles, changing tastes in fashion and leisure, and the aspirations of the middle class to keep abreast of the latest trends. Throughout the nineteenth century, France and Britain set the standards for the kinds of lifestyles and fashion that other Western societies, including Spain, emulated.83 However, high life, like flânerie, was more than just a lexical borrowing or a reference to social class and mobility. It mirrored a new understanding of leisure and public space that drew at once on foreign trends and local customs. Its focus was not so much on international trends or conspicuous foreigners as it was on a certain type of citizen and lifestyle that, though with different inflections, could be found across major Western societies. Strolling in Madrid was, therefore, tied to both local and international practices, and multiple variants of flânerie emerged. While the expression ‘high life’ was more frequent in the written language, some illustrations featured these words as captions to enhance their comedic effect. Rather than focusing on the effects of class and consumerism on private life, illustrations of high life in Madrid described collective experiences of space. Pellicer drafted an illustration entitled ‘En la Puerta del Sol. High Liffe [sic]’ that was printed in Madrid Cómico in 1888, and that depicted common idlers engaging in futile banter in Madrid’s main square (figure 3.5). Their attire and demeanour contrasted with the pompous stance and outlandish attire of the high-life strollers featured on the front cover of another satirical gazette, La Caricatura, in an 1884 illustration by caricaturist Mecachis (figure 3.6). Pellicer’s and Mecachis’s illustrations did more than critique snobbery or the emulation of European fashion. While the former lampooned elements linked to Madrid’s underclasses and the latter mocked the lifestyle of an aspiring bourgeoisie and lofty aristocracy, both illustrations reflected on the points of convergence between cosmopolitan fashion (like the leisurely stroll) and perceived local customs (such as petty conversation). This type of self-deprecating humour showed a high level of awareness of the implications of extra-local fashions coalescing with preexisting practices.

Strolling the city 151

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



3.5  Josep Lluís Pellicer, ‘En la Puerta del Sol. High-Liffe [sic]’, Madrid Cómico, 270 (21 April 1888), 4

Madrid on the move

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

152

3.6  Mecachis (pseud. of Eduardo Sáenz Hermúa), ‘High Life’, La Caricatura, 7 (15 December 1884)



Strolling the city 153

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Another variant of the male stroller was the young, cocky lad or pollo. This figure resembled earlier character types that emerged throughout the 1700 and early 1800s and resembled the fop, such as the petimetre, the ­currutaco, or the piri who emerged in the southern city of Cádiz.84 Different variants of this character type appeared across Europe during this time, and while it was first mocked due to its flamboyant style, towards the late 1700s the figure became associated with more positive traits related to understatement and attention to detail.85 The pollo, which translates as cock in English, was an enduring archetype that persisted until the turn of the twentieth century. The figure of the pollo had associations with the English archetype of the dandy, which appeared in costumbrista volumes and etiquette manuals as early as 1829.86 While early editions of these etiquette manuals championed emulating European fashions and norms of urbanity, in successive revisions writers not only transposed French patterns of behaviour but also altered the content of the volumes to adapt to the needs and interests of a Spanish audience.87 Like dandies, pollos were typically represented as young, middle-class, fashionably dressed men with a demeanour that moved between indifference and snobbery. In the middle decades of the century, representations of male strollers shared characteristics with Paul Gavarni’s sketches of the flâneur, as printed in Auguste de Lacroix’s influential 1841 essay.88 Pollos also bore a resemblance to depictions of the flâneur. Their characteristic attire consisted of a top hat and a fitted sack coat. The pollo later crossed over to other forms of printed media, such as the satirical press and the genre of prints known as aleluyas, as seen in Historia de un gallo social (Story of a social rooster, ca. 1860–70; figure 3.7).89 Aleluyas, or auques in Catalan, were forms of popular print composed of sequences of vignettes and reproduced as broadsheets. Aleluyas emerged in Spain in the eighteenth century and eventually, towards 1800, included explanatory texts beneath the image.90 The development of this type of sequential narrative followed a similar pattern across Europe.91 In Spain, these broadsheets represented sequences related to the lives of saints, daily customs, or social types like the gallo social. Although aleluyas lost ground to the popular press in the late nineteenth century, their influence continued, and in the 1880s, satirical magazines like Los Madriles built on the sequencing typical of aleluya broadsheets.92 In fact, as noted by Manuel Barrero, the term historieta (narrative cartoon strip) was not coined in Spain until the mid-1870s. Until then, illustrators used the long-standing term aleluya to identify this vignette-type structure.93 Thus, it was not only the visual tradition of the aleluya that persisted but also the connotations of the term itself. Historia de un gallo social, an aleluya by Juan Llorens dating from around 1870, consisted of forty vignettes recounting the social adventures and ­misfortunes of a

Madrid on the move

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

154

3.7  Juan Llorens, Historia de un gallo social, ca. 1860–70. Broadside, wood engraving and letterpress. 43.8 × 32.1 cm



Strolling the city 155

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

young man represented in the shape of a rooster. It parodied the presumptuous stroller for his preoccupation with his appearance and the special care he devoted to purchasing the right attire from fashionable shops. In Madrid, by the 1880s, depictions of pollos and high-life strollers recalling representations of the flâneur had become so ubiquitous that, in addition to their presence being explicitly indicated in captions or in storylines like Llorens’s aleluya, these figures also appeared in the background of several illustrations.94 Illustrators and journalists frequently used another trope to draw attention to these hybrid variants of flânerie and increase their comic effect. They paired the term high life or flâneur with motifs and words associated with Madrid’s lower classes, such as romero (pilgrim), paleto (bumpkin), caló (gypsy), the working-class neighbourhood of Lavapiés, or the spontaneous conversations of poorly dressed idlers like those Pellicer depicted in his ‘En la Puerta del Sol. High Liffe’.95 The journalist Isidoro Fernández Flórez, who wrote under the pseudonym Fernanflor, skilfully addressed the transformation of Madrid’s social fabric and urban life due to the dual factors of migration and European trends. In an article entitled ‘Madrid – Barcelona’, he described the 1888 universal exhibition of Barcelona through the eyes of an archetypical high-life pollo from Madrid – young, flirtatious, witty, and fickle. The author likened Madrid to the Tower of Babel as well as to a foundling home that took in migrants from Spain’s more impoverished regions of Galicia to the north and Andalusia to the south. What resulted from the mix was, according to the fictional character, ‘un cosmopolitanismo rumboso’ (a showy cosmopolitanism), where different regional identities coalesced, and, as a result, specific identities were played down. As such, after being exposed to city life, a provincial idler could become a flâneur without even realising, and ‘al mes de flanear por la Puerta del Sol, se entra en cualquier peluquería para que le ricen el pelo’ (after one month of flanear at the Puerta del Sol, he walks into any barbershop to have his hair done).96 The transformations that enabled the common idler to become – sometimes unknowingly – a flâneur mirrored the effects of migration and foreign influence, on the one hand, and fostered an image of the capital as a convivial city, on the other. The text also interrogated to what extent flânerie was a new practice and how it differed from existing modes of managing public space. This form of self-deprecating humour worked on various levels. As was explored in the introduction, scholars like Edward Baker, Susan Larson, and Deborah Parsons have noted that the juxtaposition of elements of the local and cosmopolitanism was in fact a trait of Madrid’s modernity.97 Likewise, in other Spanish cities, as Valis has pointed out in relation to Cádiz, the mix of foreign and indigenous was central to the appearance of new cultural

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

156

Madrid on the move

concepts and urban identities.98 What is more, these hybrid versions of the flâneur show the fluidity between perceptions of localness and foreignness and reveal the extent to which perceived local customs and international practices were becoming entangled due to migration, social mobility, and exposure to new fashions. Fernanflor’s small-town flâneur and images of pollos convey an idea of Madrilenian identity and authenticity that strayed away from the specific. Instead, illustrators and journalists emphasised the points of intersection between high and low culture, and between local and foreign practices. These high-life male strollers and flâneurs – either aspiring or accomplished – were considered to be more authentic because they had lost their specificity. They were associated with Madrilenian identity not because of some perceived local undertones but rather because of their ambiguity. The specific origins of Madrid’s past were overlooked in these representations of public space and flânerie, which were framed within an entangled landscape of migration, cosmopolitanism, vice, noise, and sociability. Textual and visual representations of high life, flânerie, and pollos were all inflections of the same effect – international practices informing how inhabitants in Madrid viewed themselves and mediated public space. This exercise in historical self-awareness pushed citizens to continuously redefine perceptions of the local and the foreign, and existing and new public practices, many times blurring the limits between the two. This chapter has explored the meanings of flânerie in late nineteenthcentury Madrid and perceptions of sociability in spaces like the Puerta del Sol. While the validity of the flâneur was questioned in Madrid, the issues of representation and lexicon as well as the debates that transpired reveal an acute awareness of the demands brought about by urbanisation, European  patterns of behaviour, and Spanish conceptualisations of walking. Foreign practices and the types of behaviour they promoted, including flânerie, brought forth the need to reflect on looking, walking, and socialising. Because the flâneur is an archetype strongly bound to the literature of a modernity focused on Paris, the study of the figure in a different context and the analysis of nineteenth-century chroniclers and artists’ negotiation of the meanings of strolling contribute to dislocating or offsetting the concept of modernity. The remaining chapters of this book will focus in a more nuanced way on the depiction of social types and customs and the long-standing genre of costumbrismo. While this chapter focused on ideas about a specific urban archetype and one of Madrid’s main sites, the chapter that follows deals with the role of memory and nostalgia in forging coherent ideas of the present and future. If archetypes like the flâneur can be dislocated, representations of social types and customs – so prevalent in Madrid’s illustrated print culture – must also be reread from a vantage point that positions them in relation to a broader international setting.



Strolling the city 157

Notes

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

  1 Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities. Reimagining the Urban (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 11.   2 Chris Jenks, ‘Watching your step: The history and practice of the flâneur’, in Jenks (ed.), Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995), 148, 156.   3 Mary Gluck, ‘The flâneur and the aesthetic appropriation of urban culture in mid-19th-century Paris’, Theory Culture Society, 20:5 (2003), 54.   4 Auguste de Lacroix, ‘Le flâneur’, in Les français peints par eux-mêmes, vol. 4 (Paris: L. Curmer, Éditeur. 1841); Huart, Physiologie du flaneur.  5 Lauster, Sketches of the Nineteenth Century, 59–84.   6 Gluck, ‘The flâneur’, 54.   7 Dorde Cuvardic García, El flâneur en las prácticas culturales, el costumbrismo y el modernismo (Paris: Editions Publibook Universitaires, 2012), 233–428.   8 Tom Gretton, ‘Not the flâneur again: Reading magazines and living the metropolis around 1880’, in Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough (eds.), The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 94.   9 Rather than attempting to discern the existence of the flâneuse, recent studies examine the experience of women vis-à-vis public space. See, for example, Temma Balducci and Heather Belnap Jensen (eds.), Women, Femininity and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789–1914 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014); and my chapter ‘De paseo’. For an overview of these shifts, see Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough, introduction to D’Souza and McDonough (eds.), The Invisible Flâneuse?, 1–17. 10 See, for example, Richard Wrigley (ed.), The Flâneur Abroad: Historical and International Perspectives (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014). 11 Valis, The Culture of Cursilería, 72. 12 Antonio Hoffmeyer, ‘Flaneo’, La Época, 10,961 supplement (14 January 1883). The original wording is provided later in this section. 13 Manuel Carreras y González, ‘El transeúnte’, Semanario Pintoresco Español (2 February 1848), 61–2. For a discussion on the political significance of this text, see Pla Vivas, Ilustración gráfica, 143–4. 14 Luis Mariano de Larra, ‘Una conquista’, La Ilustración Artística, 308 (21 November 1887), 308, italics and ellipses in the original. 15 Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua castellana, en que se explica el verdadero sentido de las voces, su naturaleza y calidad, con las frases o modos de hablar, los proverbios o refranes, y otras cosas convenientes al uso de la lengua (Madrid: Imprenta de Francisco del Hierro, 1729), vol. 2, 72–4. 16 Ibid., 74. 17 See, for example, entries for callejear and callejero in Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua castellana por la Real Academia Española, 12th ed. (Madrid: Imprenta de D. Gregorio Hernando, 1884), 193. 18 Hoffmeyer, ‘Flaneo’.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

158

Madrid on the move

19 Honoré de Balzac’s Physiologie du mariage was published in 1829 and first translated to Spanish in 1841. Subsequent editions in Spanish appeared in 1867 and 1879. For the Spanish translation of this paragraph, see Balzac, Fisiología del matrimonio o meditaciones de filosofía ecléctica sobre la felicidad y la desgracia conyugal, trans. Alberto Robert (Madrid: Librería de Alfonso Durán, 1867), 43. 20 Hoffmeyer, ‘Flaneo’, italics in the original. 21 Asmodeo (pseud. of Ramón de Navarrete y Fernández Landa), ‘Cartas de Asmodeo’, La Época, 7,621 (17 August 1873). 22 Nicole Plümer, Anglizismus – Purismus – Sprachliche Identität: Eine Untersuchung zu den Anglizismen in der deutschen und französischen Mediensprache Europäische (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), 20, qtd. in Esme WinterFroemel, ‘Unpleasant, unnecessary, unintelligible? Cognitive and communicative criteria for evaluating borrowings and alternative strategies’, in Roswitha Fischer and Hanna Pulaczewska (eds.), Anglicisms in Europe (Newcastle-uponTyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 17. 23 Donald Winford, An Introduction to Contact Linguistics (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 6–7. 24 Real Academia Española, ‘Advertencia’, in Diccionario manual e ilustrado de la lengua española (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1927), viii. 25 Ibid., 944. 26 ‘Recorredores de Calles’, La Discusión, 1:557 (2 October 1873). Callejear appeared in Fernández de los Ríos, ‘La quincena parisiense’, IEA, 3 May 1879; Manuel Matoses, ‘El inspector de escaparates’, MUC, 157 (23 January 1876), 2–6. 27 See, for example, Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, Panorama matritense (Primera serie de las escenas) 1832 a 1935 (Madrid: Oficinas de la Ilustración Española y Americana, 1881), 113–20, 341–50. 28 Versteeg, Jornaleros de la pluma, 145, 152. 29 Within this extensive genre of literature, see for example, Carlos Frontaura, ‘Tipos madrileños’, IEA, 5 suppl. (8 February 1888), 99, 102; Manuel Fernández y González, ‘Las dos Victorias’, IEA, 22 (15 June 1883), 370–2. 30 Peregrín García Cadena, ‘Los ceros de Juan Araña’, IEA, 30 (August 15, 1880), 90. 31 On the subject of observation and technological innovations in the nineteenth century, see Crary, Techniques of the Observer. 32 Dorde Cuvardic García, ‘El flâneur y la flânerie en el costumbrismo español’, Filología y Linguistíca, 1 (2009), 29, 32. 33 Huart, Physiologie du flâneur, 20–1. 34 See, for example, Emilio Huelín, ‘Las ferias de Madrid’, IEA, 28 suppl. (5 October 1871); Ricardo Molina, ‘Dos Matrimonios’, El Museo Universal, 9 (2 March 1862), 71–2. 35 Valis, The Culture of Cursilería, 72. 36 Deborah Parsons, ‘Paris is not Rome, or Madrid: Locating the city of m ­ odernity’, Critical Quarterly, 44:2 (July 2002), 23–5.



Strolling the city 159

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

37 Ricardo Sepúlveda, ‘Croquis’, IEA, 1 (8 January 1876), 14. 38 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 97. Nead applies Certeau’s framework to Victorian London in Victorian Babylon, 74–80. 39 Versteeg, Jornaleros de la pluma, 145, 152. 40 Ricardo, ‘Reunión de los notables … de mi pueblo’, El Solfeo 76 (15 November 1875). 41 Versteeg, Jornaleros de la pluma, 52. Charnon-Deutsch, Hold That Pose, 93. 42 Juan Luis León, ‘Madrid. Una fuente de la vecindad’, ByN, 8 April 1893. 43 See Akiko Tsuchiya, ‘Talk, small and not so small: The power of gossip in Clarín’s La Regenta’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 31:3 (Spring 2007), 391–412. 44 Juan de Madrid (pseud. of Julio Nombela), ‘Paseos de Madrid. Los jardines de Recoletos’, IEA, 1 (25 December 1869), 14. 45 See Wrigley, introduction to The Flâneur Abroad, 12. 46 Jacinto Benavente, ‘Confidencias’, MC, 820 (5 November 1898), 765. 47 This observation first appeared in Walter Benjamin, ‘The return of the flâneur’ (1929), in Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (eds.), Selected Writings, vol. 2, pt. 1, 1927–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 263, italics in the original. Benjamin briefly mentioned Rome in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 417, 880. 48 Walter Benjamin with Asia Lacis, ‘Nápoles’, in Adriana Mancini (ed.), Cuadros de un Pensamiento (Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi, 1992), 13–26. 49 Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (New York: Routledge, 1998), 120. 50 Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (Malden, MD: Blackwell, 2002), 95–6. 51 Fernández de los Ríos, Guía de Madrid, 657. Parsons notes that the café also represented the kind of semiprivate interior Benjamin tied to the flâneur: A Cultural History of Madrid, 41. 52 Henri Lefebvre, ‘Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean cities’, in Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (eds. and trans.), Writings on Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 228–39. This link between Henri Lefebvre’s analysis of Mediterranean cities and Madrid follows Deborah Parsons’s excellent reading in A Cultural History of Madrid, 9. 53 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 365. 54 Jean-Louis Guereña, ‘Un ensayo empírico que se convierte en un proyecto razonado: Notas sobre la historiografía de la sociabilidad’, in Alberto Valín (ed.), La sociabilidad en la historia contemporánea. Reflexiones teóricas y ejercicios de análisis (Ourense: Duen de Bux, 2001), 23. He builds here on the work of Maurice Agulhon. 55 On the porosity between genres, see Palenque, ‘Entre periodismo y literatura’. 56 In the essay ‘La mujer española’ (1890), Emilia Pardo Bazán stated that Spanish women had more of a tendency than their European counterparts to ‘callejear’

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

160

Madrid on the move

or ‘echarse a la calle’, due to the favourable weather conditions, something also observed by Benavente in the text referenced in the above section. Pardo Bazán, ‘La mujer española’ (1890), in La mujer española y otros escritos (Madrid: Cátedra, 1999), 163. 57 Otero Carvajal and Pallol Trigueros, ‘Tradición y modernidad’, 84–5. 58 Valis, The Culture of Cursilería, 35. On interclassism in public space, see Carmen del Moral Ruiz, ‘Ocio y esparcimiento en Madrid hacia 1900’, Arbor, 666 (June 2001), 497; and Jorge Uría, ‘Cultura popular y actividades recreativas: La Restauración’, in Uría (ed.), La cultura popular en la España contemporánea. Doce estudios (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2003), 77–107. 59 See, for example, Eusebio Blasco (ed.), Madrid por dentro y por fuera, Guía de forasteros incautos. Misterios de la Corte, enredos y mentiras (Madrid: J. Peña, 1873), 10; Fernández de los Ríos, El futuro Madrid, 20; Eduardo Lustonó, ‘La Puerta del Sol’, IEA, 27 (22 July 1882), 42–3. 60 On the standardisation of global time standards, see Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time. The international Unified Postal Union (UPU) was created in 1874, and the Unión Postal de las Américas, España y Portugal (UPAEP) was established in 1911. 61 José Jimeno Agius, ‘Algunas palabras sobre el Journal de la société de statistique de Paris’, Revista General de Estadística, 11 (January 1863), 3. The magazine provided monthly articles on the conference from April to December. 62 See, for example, the sections ‘Movimiento de la enajenación mental en Europa y en la América del Norte’ and ‘Noticias estadísticas sobre la población del Canadá’, Revista General de Estadística, 16 (June 1863) 340–4, 353–5. This council devoted to the study of statistics was established in 1859. It was initially named the Comisión de Estadística del Reino and was subsequently renamed as the Junta de Estadística and, in 1870, as the Instituto Geográfico y Estadístico. 63 J. M. de la Torre, ‘Movimiento de Londres y de Madrid’, Revista General de Estadística, 15 (May 1863), 281–3; La Época, 4,729 (29 July 1863). 64 Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 6. 65 See figure 60 and Perea ‘Las modas’, MUC, 13 (23 May 1875), 4. 66 Reglamento de policía urbana para la M. H. villa de Madrid, aprobado por el Excmo. Ayuntamiento Constitucional de la misma (Madrid: Imprenta de Cruz González, 1841), 40. A section of the article was reprinted in Fernández de los Ríos, El futuro Madrid, 20. Fernández de los Ríos also commented on the need for strolling rather than industriousness; see 322. 67 Eugenio de Ochoa, Madrid, París y Londres (Paris: Baudry, 1861), 454. 68 Pérez Galdós, Fortunata y Jacinta, 189; Armando Palacio Valdés, La Espuma. Novela de costumbres contemporáneas (Barcelona: Imprenta de Henrich y Compañía, 1890), 6. The historian Edward Baker discusses the compact character of the Spanish capital in ‘Cómo se escribe una historia cultural’, 23–4. 69 This information was garnered through the map in Carlos Hernández Quero, Rubén Pallol Trigueros, and Fernando Vicente Albarrán, ‘Metropolización y trasformación del espacio urbano y de los rasgos sociales en Madrid entre 1900



Strolling the city 161

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

y 1936’, in Luis Enrique Otero Carvajal and Rubén Pallol Trigueros (eds.), La sociedad urbana en España, 1900–1936 (Madrid: Catarata, 2017), 102–3. 70 Ibid., 103. 71 Manuel González Portilla, Josu Hernando Pérez, and Josetxo Urrutikoetxea Lizarraga, ‘Desarrollo urbano y flujos migratorios: Los desequilibrios regionales en el primer proceso modernizador español, 1860–1930’, in Otero Carvajal and Pallol Trigueros (eds.), La sociedad urbana, 71, 74, 78. 72 See, for example, Pellicer, ‘En la Puerta del Sol’, El Solfeo, 139 (18 January 1876); ‘En la Puerta del Sol’, MUC, 10 (3 January 1873), 2. 73 José Luis Pellicer, ‘Paseos por Madrid. La Puerta del Sol iluminada con la luz eléctrica – (dibujo del natural por el Sr Pellicer)’, IEA, 41 (20 April 1878), 276. 74 Lustonó, ‘La Puerta del Sol’, 42–3, italics in the original. The Iglesia del Buen Suceso was a church formerly located at the Puerta del Sol, torn down during the square’s renovation in the mid-1850s. Fuente de la Mariblanca was a fountain located at the square and removed during the 1838 disentailment. 75 Manuel Ossorio y Bernard, Viaje Crítico alrededor de la Puerta del Sol (Madrid: Imprenta de los Señores Rojas, 1874), 3–4. 76 On this subject, see Kevin Loughran, Gary Alan Fine, and Marcus Anthony Hunter, ‘Urban spaces, city cultures, and collective memories’, in Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen (eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 193. 77 Pierre Nora, ‘Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire’ (1989), trans. Marc Roudebush, in Schwartz and Przyblyski (eds.), The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, 236–7. 78 Ann Rigney, ‘Cultural memory studies: Mediation, narrative, and the aesthetic’, in Tota and Hagen (eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies, 65. 79 See Bjarne Rogan, ‘An entangled object: The picture postcard as souvenir and collectible, exchange and ritual communication’, Cultural Analysis, 4 (2005), 1–27. 80 See, for example, Benito Pérez Galdós, Lo prohibido (1884–85; Madrid: Peraldo, Páez y compañía, 1906), vol. 1, 109; advertisements in El Americano, 47 (7  February 1873), 795; ‘Nuestros grabados. Carlton Club. Pall Mall (Londres)’, La Ilustración Ibérica, 4 July 1885, 431; ‘Crónica extranjera’, La Época, 12,551 (3 July 1887). 81 See Valis, The Culture of Cursilería, esp. 1–30. Valis defines cursilería as a phenomenon that was prevalent in nineteenth-century Spain among the middle classes, whose capital grew in this period. As social mobility increased, the middle classes more readily displayed their wealth to exaggerate their social status. Valis argues that expressions of cursilería were a sign of Spain’s uneasy modernization process throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 82 Jesús Cruz, ‘Building liberal identities in 19th century Madrid: The role of middle class material culture’, Americas, 60:3 (January 2004), 341–410. 83 Cruz, The Rise of Middle-Class Culture, 112, 224. 84 Valis places the emergence of the piri in Cádiz in 1817: The Culture of Cursilería, 72. Elizabeth Amann discusses these Spanish types as well as other European

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

162

Madrid on the move

versions in Dandyism in the Age of Revolution: The Art of the Cut (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 85 Amann, Dandyism in the Age of Revolution, 1. 86 Antonio Flores linked the pollo to the dandy in ‘Los pollos de 1850’, Ayer, hoy y mañana, vol. 2, 247, 249. The 1829 etiquette manual El hombre fino al gusto del día: Manual completo de urbanidad cortesía y buen tono by Mariano Rementería y Fica was among the first texts to use the word dandy, as noted by Russell Sebold, ‘Figaro y el hombre fino’, in De ilustrados y románticos (Madrid: Ediciones El Museo Universal, 1992), 375, qtd. in Cruz, The Rise of Middle-Class Culture, 28. Álvaro Molina has identified an earlier use of the term dandi in a 1797 print by Francisco de Goya: Mujeres y hombres en la España ilustrada: Identidad, género y visualidad (Madrid: Cátedra, 2013), 380–1. 87 Cruz, The Rise of Middle-Class Culture, 29. 88 Pla Vivas, La ilustración gráfica, 131. 89 See, for example, MUC, 2 (10 November 1872), 2. 90 Ángela Birner, ‘Los pliegos de aleluyas’, Anthropos: Revista de documentación científica de la cultura, 166/167 (May–August 1995), 117. 91 See Mainardi, Another World, 215–8. 92 See, for example, A. Pons, ‘Diario Cómico’, Los Madriles, 12 (12 December 1888), 2. 93 Barrero, ‘Orígenes de la historieta española’, 32. The artist Eduardo Sojo (pseud. Demócrito) also experimented with compositions inspired by aleluyas. See, for example, El Motín, 27 (9 October 1881). 94 See, for example, Daniel Perea, ‘Escenas matritenses’, MUC, 78 (26 April 1874); David Perea, ‘Costumbres Madrileñas. Paseo de carruajes en la fuente de la Castellana en una tarde de primavera’, IEA, 11 (22 March 1876), 200–1; Ricardo Sepúlveda and Luque, ‘Aventuras Nocturnas’, MUC, 3 May 1874, 6; José Luis Pellicer, ‘Los pollos’, MUC, 10 November 1872, 2. 95 See, for example, Federico García Caballero, ‘Verdades inconclusas. Las cosas pequeñas’, IEA, 24 (30 June 1877), 340; ‘Al Santo!’, IEA, 18 (15 May 1885), 293; La Iberia, 17 May 1879, 3; Revista Contemporánea, 16 (July 1878), 123. 96 Fernanflor, ‘Madrid – Barcelona’, La Ilustración Ibérica, 300 (29 September 1888), 610. Pajares is a mountainous region in northern Spain between Asturias and León. 97 See Baker, Madrid Cosmopolita; Larson, ‘Stages of modernity’; Parsons, ‘Paris is not Rome, or Madrid’; Parsons, ‘Fiesta culture in Madrid posters’. 98 Valis argues that the mix of people from different social backgrounds and regions propelled an ebullient type of cosmopolitanism, but that this assimilation did not mean there was not a resistance to foreign influence: The Culture of Cursilería, 72.

4

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Sketching social types: local contexts, modern customs, visual traditions What served in the place of the photograph, before the camera’s invention? The expected answer is the engraving, the drawing, the painting. The more revealing answer might be: memory. —John Berger

Many of the images analysed in this book so far were rooted in the genre of costumbrismo. The dominant style in literature and the visual arts for much of the nineteenth century, costumbrismo presented local archetypes and picturesque scenes related to daily life. These depictions of social types were featured extensively on the pages of illustrated books and periodicals and also appeared in innovative visual media like photography, postcards, and early cinematography.1 They were a vital component of the light-hearted theatrical and musical genre called género chico, as well as the zarzuela that became popular at the turn of the century. That the tropes and topics of the genre crossed over into a range of different media exposes to what extent the cultural landscape was interconnected. The value of costumbrista social types lies not only in the shared concerns they broadcasted but in their ability to cross over multiple forms of popular culture and the underlying motivations and mechanisms (visual, social, and economic) that compelled a growing consumer-driven society to engage with these representations.2 The previous chapters of this book had two overarching objectives: to explain how the early print revolution of the 1830s and developments throughout the following decades contributed to forming visually educated audiences whose demands and tastes were in turn reflected back onto popular print culture, and to analyse how public narratives articulated meanings of the modern in relation to phenomena occurring on a local and international scale. The remaining two chapters of this book concentrate on late nineteenth-century costumbrismo images and their engagement with issues such as modernisation and internationalism. If framing Madrid’s urbanisation as part of a series of worldwide interrelationships calls into question the idea of modernity as a rupture, depictions of types

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

164

Madrid on the move

and customs (of the past and present) must be rethought in this light. Failing to do so would reduce nineteenth-century audiences to passive viewers and these depictions to mere remnants of an outmoded style. A better picture of Madrid’s visual culture should explain the widespread presence of the visual nomenclature of costumbrismo and its popularity. The problematic relationship between costumbrismo and modernisation, and similarly between lo castizo and cosmopolitanism, has a long history in Spanish literature and scholarship.3 We have already seen the discussion that is commonly termed the ‘problema de España’ and its impact on interpretations of Spain’s cultural production as a struggle between romantic elements linked to national identity and foreign influence. The unsettling coexistence of costumbrista subjects and modernisation can be further nuanced by unearthing the fluid dynamics that existed between these binaries. To this end, this chapter takes a closer look at the inner workings of the style. It looks beyond readings that frame costumbrismo as outmoded and static, or as a style purporting conservative values and national ideologies.4 After all, such ‘top-down’ models fall short of considering that an entertainment industry that is market-driven cannot always control its output or determine how consumers will respond.5 In line with scholarship that emphasises the intercultural and transnational nature of costumbrismo, I assess the genre on three fronts: its use as a widely accessible visual language, its reliance on collective memory, and its ties to popular culture. First, I consider the aesthetic style’s ability to function as a visual language that was understood across cultural and national contexts. Depictions of character types and physiological characters had an established history in European print culture, appearing in albums and periodicals since the early nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, the costumbrista aesthetic was familiar to middle-class readers across Europe and the Americas. In this sense, it was an international visual language just as powerful as words that had the potential to communicate on local issues, varying from setting to setting but sharing a similar visual lexicon. Second, I examine the role that collective memory played in forging this language. Illustrators and writers experimented with the genre, creating and updating types, and drawing from shared memories and certain discourses audiences could identify in order to follow the visual narratives. Elements of costumbrismo served as agents of recall that created a sense of continuity between former practices and new ones. Memory and time, after all, are fundamentally tied to costumbrismo. Not only was remembering necessary to participate in the visual language of costumbrismo but images were laden with nostalgia and references to the past. Jo Labanyi has made the point that costumbrismo was much more than a ‘nostalgic resistance to modernity’.6 Nostalgia did not signify a desire to revert to a bygone past;

Sketching social types 165



Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

rather, it was an epistemic device meant to comment on the past and negotiate change.7 Third, the chapter examines costumbrismo’s ties to an emerging mass print culture and leisure industry. With its intercultural qualities, ability to cross over to different media, and straightforward and accessible messages, late nineteenth-century costumbrismo shares some of the basic requirements of popular culture. The style speaks of the dynamic interplay that existed between the audience and cultural producer and their shared knowledge of how the genre worked. Various factors stimulated the profusion of types and street scenes. Images concentrating on daily life responded to the consolidation of the urban middle classes and their consumer demands, which gradually shaped a popular entertainment industry.8 In addition, with the liberalisation of the Spanish press laws in 1883, many new periodicals and editorial ventures were created. Although censorship laws were relaxed, cartoons and sketches reproduced in Madrid’s humour magazines (some of which had a conservative slant) circumvented criticism of political institutions, instead focusing on episodes of daily life that built on costumbrismo. At first glance, these caricatures may seem to have offered a naive and lenient examination of society; however, their humorous analysis of everyday rituals and public behaviours displayed a subdued criticism on multiple issues, from migration, labour, and social inequality to civic education, urbanisation, and gender relations. The types of late nineteenth-century costumbrismo were not always explicit in their social critique, but they did put the spotlight on the capital’s shortcomings and reveal how the visual language of costumbrismo evolved in tandem with new patterns of consumption and the changing face of the city. Writers, journalists, and editors redefined the aims of the genre and its role in the city’s incipient mass culture.

Reframing social types: the international language of costumbrismo

Popular print culture portrayed a variety of archetypes inhabiting the streets of Madrid. Types were represented engaging in daily activities, from strolling and boarding the tram to flirting and pickpocketing. Though they seldom engaged directly with matters related to politics or national affairs, costumbrista types did play an important role in echoing changing sentiments towards urbanisation, fashion, migration, gender and class relations, and internationalism. Lou Charnon-Deutsch argues that the central theme of nineteenth-century visual culture in Spain was the vicissitudes of the daily life of a growing middle class.9 While these popular representations focused primarily on contemporary concerns, they were rooted in the longstanding tradition of visual and literary costumbrismo. The c­ onventional

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

166

Madrid on the move

yet revamped genre of costumbrismo had the potential to deal with such vicissitudes in a candid way that at the same time was light-hearted and easy to interpret. Costumbrista-inspired topics afforded sketchers an extensive repertoire of themes due to the genre’s well-established stylistic conventions. In this sense, in the late nineteenth century, the codes and cues of costumbrismo were components of a larger structure of visual language that both the sketcher and the audience understood and negotiated. These illustrations, therefore, moved well beyond a mere depiction of exhausted or rehashed stereotypes. Rather, they allowed for blatant as well as veiled social commentary and reflected on the relevance of the image (and the image-text) as a means of communication just as powerful as words. Costumbrismo is commonly associated with nineteenth-century literature and journalism. In broad terms, the genre can be described as a dominant style in literature from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, coinciding with the romantic period in Spain. The cuadro de costumbres (sketch of mores) concentrated on archetypes and scenes related to daily life and customs, and proved to be an adequate vehicle to convey a rapidly changing society moving towards a bourgeois liberal order.10 Recently, literary critics have underscored costumbrismo’s cosmopolitan slant and the genre’s intercultural nature and ability to bring high and low culture into dialogue.11 Among the achievements ascribed to costumbrismo is the dialectical interplay that occurred between ideology and leisure, scientific categorisation and free observation, and collective and individual subjectivity.12 While literary costumbrismo has received more attention than visual iterations of the genre, they go hand in hand. Costumbrista imagery further enhanced and reworked the iconographic attributes of a range of social archetypes and scenes. In Spain, collections of prints representing typified men and women in the costumes of their trade were published as early as 1777 and continued to appear throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.13 These collections depicted street vendors in customary garb displaying the attributes of their trade. Eighteenth-century prints inspired depictions of social types throughout the nineteenth century in albums of types and early illustrated newspapers, as seen in the series ‘Los vendedores de Madrid’ (Vendors of Madrid, 1848) published in the periodical Museo de las Familias (figure 4.1). These collections of physiological types were linked to a style of socio-scientific literature that spread throughout Europe and Latin America from the mid-nineteenth century. These albums contained chapters written by several contributors and featured full-page plates of select types. Sketches of social types acquired even more visibility at this time thanks to developments in the printing and press industry. Representations of social types adjusted to the readership’s shifting techniques of perception and new technological advances.14 By the 1850s, the

4.1  ‘Los vendedores de Madrid’, Museo de las Familias, 6 (25 December 1848), 273, 276

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

168

Madrid on the move

relationship between visual and literary costumbrismo was a two-way street, and, as a result, writers relied on narrative techniques inspired by painting and optical artefacts like the panorama, daguerreotype, and photography.15 The illustrated and satirical press proved to be a fertile ground for experimentation that afforded artists opportunities to develop innovative layouts and connect images and words in new ways. The satirical press concentrated on scenes of public life and combined them with caricatures of prominent figures. Private space was generally absent. When depictions of interiors did make their way onto the pages of the press, it was to highlight their relation to specific aspects of public life. Costumbrista-inspired topics were, in essence, tied to discourses of public life. Recent scholarship highlights two aspects of the genre that shed light on its persistence and popularity: its existence across a range of visual and printed media, and its cosmopolitan nature. Long-held views that costumbrismo was an outmoded style intended to express and market ideas of the nation have been tested in favour of a more transnational approach concentrating on its progressive aesthetic.16 Considering the popularity of albums of social types throughout the nineteenth century and the existence of similar repertories in Spain, Latin America, and Europe, it becomes evident that the global underpinnings of this phenomenon deserve a closer look. Not only did images of social types share stylistic and thematic traits but enterprises across the world relied on similar printing techniques to promote these works. Mey-Yen Moriuchi has observed that ‘the use of social types to represent a nation’s identity was a transnational endeavour’. Though different terms were used to describe these archetypes, like tipos populares in Spanish or types populaires in French, they all responded to a universal interest that arose in the nineteenth century to typecast figures.17 While the genre of costumbrismo is associated with nineteenth-century Spain, the term was not coined until 1895, by Miguel de Unamuno, and it long retained associations commonly linked to Spain even when it was a pan-European genre.18 The adjective costumbrista has become commonplace in colloquial language in Spain, and even today it is used to indicate that something has local colour or is rooted in outmoded conventions associated with the picturesque or a lost sense of authenticity. Although the penchant for typecasting and depicting local customs had been visible since the eighteenth century, the name of the style itself – costumbrismo – emerged at a time when several other competing -isms were taking hold in literature and the arts. Following the success of costumbrismo collections across Europe in the romantic period, their popularity in Spain rose again during the 1870s and 1880s.19 During this brief time, which Valeriano Bozal termed ‘segundo costumbrismo’ (second costumbrismo),20 existing types were updated and new



Sketching social types 169

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

ones were created in collected volumes such as the 1881 Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas (Spanish, American, and Lusitanian women described by themselves), published by Juan Pons and edited by Faustina Sáez de Melgar. This book covered nearly twenty different regions in Spain, Portugal, and their current or former territories, including the Philippines, Mexico, Cuba, and California. It featured twentyeight prints by Eusebio Planas and sixty-two brief articles by female writers who were either from the locations specified or had first-hand experience of these places. Las mujeres españolas was innovative on two levels. First, while it was edited and illustrated by two men, the vast 850-page project was a joint contribution of sixty-two female writers who shared a common objective – to realistically portray women and challenge archetypes fashioned by men. Two important collections written by male writers had been published in the previous decade, Las españolas pintadas por los españoles (Spanish women described by Spanish men, 1871–72) and Las mujeres españolas, portugesas y americanas (Spanish, Portuguese and American women, 1872–76), but neither of these volumes included the subtitle ‘por sí mismas’ (by themselves), which was commonly included in this kind of volume, and which Sáez de Melgar’s volume would later incorporate.21 The authors of Las mujeres españolas, despite coming from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, all generally underscored the hybridity of women,22 describing the multiplicity of women’s roles and challenging commonplace categories. Sáez de Melgar’s introduction to the volume questioned the way in which men pigeonholed women as angels or demons, thus contesting polarised views of women as models of domesticity or fallen women. She professed that, while the volume was not intended to provoke controversy, it did call for a more accurate and versatile portrayal of women across national and local contexts.23 This volume is also evidence of the reach the costumbrista collection had acquired by the final decades of the century, as an editorial undertaking of this scale on and by women would have had difficulty coming to fruition had it not been under the auspices of this type of project. In this sense, the well-honed style of the costumbrista collection was used to bring to the fore the shortcomings of previous editions and call into question not so much the format itself but the simplistic and misguided tropes that authors had slipped into. The volume signified an important effort in gathering opinions from different regions, nations, and continents in the service of one overarching objective – to show that women across geographic locations held a multiplicity of roles in their particular contexts. These authors, therefore, did not disparage the genre; rather, they intended to use it to set the record straight. The volume did display a condescending tone when addressing Spain’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

170

Madrid on the move

overseas territories, as was the case for Cuba, and, thus, some discourses of domesticity may be read as an instrument of racial control.24 Indeed, costumbrismo dictated racial and political discourses despite its apparent universalism (a universalism that was, in essence, European).25 The development of national identities necessarily involved engaging with discourses of the local and the foreign and redefining one’s relationship with the metropolis. Doing so could mean contesting or creatively assimilating dominant cultural narratives, especially in a recent colonial context where the political and social elite were closely linked to European social mores. This process of continuously negotiating the social, geographic, and gendered boundaries of costumbrismo did not occur solely in a context of colonialism. At the heart of depictions of customs and types across European cities were issues of class and transformation that were dealt with in different ways and with a different sense of urgency. The chapters of Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas rethought restrictive classifications and the meaning of womanhood in different social and national contexts, even when the authors’ pieces were steeped in racial and social stereotyping and discourses of domesticity. This common objective of rethinking paradigms was woven into the chapters. For example, one author explained how climate altered perceptions of the household and marked a fundamental difference between what she identified as the less reserved Cuban women and the more reserved European women.26 Another author gave a detailed account of the physical and personal attributes of women in the Philippines that reinforced social  and racial categories and also illuminated the city’s heterogenous social makeup.27 A third described the regional differences among wet nurses across Spain.28 These brief pieces gave a thorough account of differences among women as well as prescriptions regarding female behaviour. Yet their unifying thread was the drive to show that a single category was insufficient to accurately illustrate their physical and personal attributes. The international slant gave this narrative further impetus and suggested a sense of sisterhood that prevailed throughout the collection. The collection’s international scope was at the heart of its search for truth. Henriette Partzsch has argued that, like other key female writers of the period, Sáez de Melgar disseminated discourses of domesticity through her writings, yet her editorial practices are also evidence of the clout she had as a rigorous editor and cultural entrepreneur who procured a vast network of transatlantic contacts across her career. It was precisely due to these relationships and organisational skills that she was commissioned for a project of this scale, during which she further expanded her contacts by advertising open calls for authors in periodicals in Portugal and Latin America.29 Many contributors began their chapters by extending their gratitude to Sáez de



Sketching social types 171

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Melgar and recounting their first-hand experience with the locations they were about to describe. This practice validated their contributions and their ability to accurately portray women from these locations. As a result, the reader acquired a true sense of the editor’s painstaking efforts as well as the contributors’ commitment to the volume’s objectives. Sáez de Melgar’s keen eye to scout out these contributors, together with their shared knowledge of the lexicon and shortcomings of the genre of costumbrismo, gave the project coherence. The cosmopolitan qualities of this imagery did not only lie in the subject matter and the places they examined, or even in the networks that were forged amongst editorial entrepreneurs, writers, and artists across different countries. These cultural products and relationships were both the cause and effect of an even more important phenomenon – the formation of a visual language that middle-class urban spectators across Western centres could interpret. In this sense, it was a shared language with similar features. Representations of customs and character types had the potential to transcend cultural and linguistic barriers and communicate opinions on such important issues as historical processes and social and urban change. Lee Fontanella has argued that one of the key traits of costumbrismo was its particular and ideologically universal character.30 This trait was in fact noted in the subtitles of volumes of social types. For example, the complete subtitle of Las mujeres indicated that it explored the impact of ‘condiciones locales y el espíritu general del país a que pertenece’ (local conditions and the general spirit of the country to which they [women] belong). Though terms like transnational, global, or glocal were not mainstream concepts in 1982 at the time of Fontanella’s groundbreaking book, his work pointed towards the cross-cultural work of the genre. Costumbrismo and its foreign variants all used a visual language honed over decades of communication and image exchange that, at the same time, retained the potential to communicate particular details about specific geographic contexts – be they regional, national, or local. Someone from Madrid could surely recognise the codes of the genre when looking at a French, British, or Mexican depiction of, say, a water carrier or a seamstress (two widely represented social types), but they would probably not be able to read the local idiosyncrasies regarding class, urbanity, geographic location, or racial and social distinctions. In the 1880s, amidst debates over reforms in press legislation, one senator acknowledged that ideas could be conveyed by way of words, writing, or printed media and thus called the printing press ‘the language of the world’.31 Different factors contributed to the universalism of these codes, from dominant political ideologies to new economic developments, but what is clear is that in part it resulted from the developments of the press and printing industry through the nineteenth century. One effect of

172

Madrid on the move

creating local and national social types may well have been the expansion of a visual language that had the ability to communicate across national and cultural boundaries.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Continuity and creativity: the tram passenger, the seamstress, and the street vendor Madrid’s press industry played an important role in updating and creating new social types throughout the final decades of the nineteenth century. Illustrations and caricatures echoed a very real continuity between early and late nineteenth-century costumbrismo. Artists and writers showed a shrewd knowledge of the genre’s conventions and the ways in which it spoke to audiences. The street vendor, the seamstress, and the tram passenger were just a few of the social types that were either created or revisited from the 1870s to the turn of the century. The popularity of these depictions coincided with second costumbrismo and with a surge in the number of comic gazettes that capitalised on the satirical twists offered by conventionalised types. From the mid-nineteenth century, graphic artists enjoyed autonomy, and the illustrated press found itself freed from the constraints of academic art.32 Satirical periodicals, furthermore, served as a platform for aspiring caricaturists and illustrators to make their way in a growing industry.33 Both writers and artists experimented with and capitalised on the popularity of satirical types and scenes. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, authors approached types in two distinct ways that also surfaced in visual costumbrismo: they created new types, and they reinterpreted and updated old ones.34 The first approach persisted well into the twentieth century, and an array of new types emerged. They mirrored transformations occurring in public space and arguably also resulted from the sheer number of comic gazettes and collections that demanded a fast turnover of relevant and up-to-date topics. Some of the original types featured in illustrated books and magazines included the tram passenger, the aspiring writer, the café waiter, and the snooty and idle client (figure 4.2).35 Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney’s analysis of the formation of collective, cultural memory offers a useful framework that can shed light on the profusion of social types in Madrid’s visual culture before the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’s foundational La mémoire collective (1950), they posit that all kinds of media, from spoken language and letters to photographs and film, provide frameworks that mould memory and experience. They work as instruments that help individuals make sense of the world, on the one hand, and as agents that

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Sketching social types 173

4.2  Julio Gros, ‘Galería de tipos. El sabio de café’, Blanco y Negro, 127 (7 October 1893), 661

mediate between ­individuals and groups, on the other. Cultural memory is, therefore, founded on the idea that ‘memory can only become collective as part of a continuous process whereby memories are shared with the help of symbolic artefacts that mediate between individuals and, in

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

174

Madrid on the move

the process, create communality across both space and time’.36 Memory becomes a collective cultural practice when ‘acts of communication and ­representation … come together so as to create a common pool of stories and figures of memory to which reference can be made’.37 Representations of social types like the street vendor and the seamstress, or the costumbrista motifs that were woven into depictions of modern-day tram passengers, served as a repository of memory and an agent of recall for an audience that was conversant with the visual language of costumbrismo. The act of ‘collective remembering’ is not a static process but one that changes over time and mediates older narratives, constructing new ones in a unique manner.38 The early illustrated periodical Semanario Pintoresco alluded to the importance of memory in forging a collective identity and serving as an archive of visual memory.39 The writers and illustrators of second costumbrismo complicated the relationship between visual, collective remembering and representation even further, because it was not only the subject matter and wording that tapped into audiences’ memory but the visual lexicon itself. Two new types that frequently appeared in the press from the 1870s to the turn of the century were the tram passenger and the conductor. These illustrations occurred in tandem with the inauguration of the first tram in Madrid in 1871 and the expansion of the network to the outskirts of the capital in the 1870s and 1880s. The new situations that were prompted by public transport received attention in illustrated print culture and brief costumbrista stories, as well as in the works of authors like Emilia Pardo Bazán and Benito Pérez Galdós – a range that attests to the blurred boundaries between formats, thematic lines, and stylistic tropes.40 In a brief 1890 piece titled ‘En tranvía’ (On the tram), Pardo Bazán utilised the journey of a tram from the Puerta del Sol to the new neighbourhood of Barrio de Salamanca to describe a range of social types, including a conductor, a midwife, pious well-to-do women with their children, and an impoverished chula, a lively woman representative of Madrid’s lower classes. These character types  were covered extensively in Madrid’s illustrated print culture as well as in visual culture across Europe, though with local inflections.41 They explored the ways in which the sharing of a small space shaped notions of privacy, propriety, and social and gender dynamics. As I have argued elsewhere, women were expected to safeguard their respectability in public spaces in new ways, such as avoiding men’s stares or travelling in the company of a chaperone.42 The tram and the new archetypes it elicited also mirrored concerns about the capital’s position in an increasingly industrialised and interconnected continent. Because the first tram in Madrid was constructed by a British company, references to English manufacturing and steel surfaced in the press in the 1870s and 1880s.43 Pérez Galdós, for instance, masterfully



Sketching social types 175

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

personified the debate regarding European modernisation by shrewdly mixing words in English and Spanish and bringing a range of archetypes into ­conversation during a tram ride, including a conductor, an uptight middle-class English woman, and an inconsiderate madrileño who was not embarrassed to doze off on the woman’s shoulder. New types like the conductor or the indiscreet man offered room for social commentary on a broad range of subject matters, from gender to interconnected networks of commerce and, together, worked towards creating a scene that could summarise multiple issues on a single page. The caricaturist Ramón Cilla skilfully captured the traits of this new character type and the experimental qualities of second costumbrismo. In a cartoon printed in 1889 under the succinct title ‘Tipos’ (Types), a brief caption clarified that the portrait of a bald man with prominent yet droopy features was just an ordinary citizen whom the illustrator had encountered on the tram ‘el otro día’ (the other day) (figure 4.3). The close-up, detailed facial features diverged from representations of conventionalised social types, which tended to highlight the character’s full body frame and some elements in the background in order to provide more information about the occupation or status of the type. This cartoon blurred the boundaries between costumbrista tropes, expressionist caricature, and methods inspired by photography, and it is an example of how caricaturists experimented with the genre towards the end of the century. The passenger had

4.3  Ramón Cilla, ‘Tipos’, Madrid Cómico, 349 (26 October 1889), 5

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

176

Madrid on the move

a recognisable face with distinctive features; however, his anonymity and ordinariness (prerequisites for being a stereotype) were reinforced not only by the title and the caption but by his blank expression and lifeless gaze. This ‘detailed ordinariness’ resonated with the tram experience, calling to mind both the strategies passengers might use to protect their privacy and the somewhat bizarre experience of sharing a small space like a tram with a stranger. Because the range of social types was so broad and writers turned almost any social situation into a convention, familiar titles like tipos, galería (gallery), and del montón (average Joe or plain Jane) underscored the one trait all the types had in common – it was their anonymity and ordinary features, not so much an identifiable trade or place of origin, that made them types. Whereas stock figures representing occupations were recognisable on account of the tools of their trade or particular attire, the representations common to second costumbrismo relied more heavily on their accessibility across social segments. They typified psychological behaviour, as with the detached tram passenger or, for example, el indeciso (the undecided), a spineless man who could not face up to life’s everyday decisions.44 Vicente Pla Vivas has argued that the influence of late nineteenth-century naturalism imbued character types with new psychological traits that stepped away from the rigid costumbrista types of the mid-century in order to establish continuity between the premodern psyche and contemporary concerns.45 Thus, the new, behavioural characterisations of second costumbrismo significantly expanded the repertories, and portraits like Cilla’s tram passenger did more than just examine physiological features or a character type’s trade and social background. They examined mindsets and behavioural attitudes, giving the middle-class reader a whole new set of prompts with which to engage. A distinctive trait of these representations was the interactions that occurred between the characters in a scene. These interactions gave the characters added meanings that went beyond a mere cataloguing of types. An important innovation lay in the fact that new stereotypes acquired meaning when read together. For instance, the cartoon sequence titled ‘Nacionalidades’ (Nationalities) published in Madrid Cómico in 1886 juxtaposed six different national stereotypes. The illustration described the protagonists of the centrefold as the Russian brute, the subservient Chinese person who eats rice, the North American mogul with deep pockets, the  hedonistic Frenchman, the entitled English explorer, and the streetwise cocky Spaniard (figure 4.4). The cultural stereotypes were described in relation to how they perceived their surroundings, behaved in public life, and engaged in consumption and leisure practices. Read in isolation, these frames represent commonplace assumptions of national identities,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Sketching social types 177

4.4  Ramón Cilla, ‘Nacionalidades’, Madrid Cómico, 163 (3 April 1886), 4–5

but taken as a whole the centrefold was a commentary on typecasting and nation-building at a time when the world map was being reconfigured as a result of imperialist drives and commercial ties and rivalries among industrialised economies. In the later decades of the century, the reworking of types in innovative visual sequences succeeded in creating a sense of historical and visual continuity. One of the main attributes of these representations was their potential to create connections between notions of the past and the present and between previous aesthetic tropes and contemporary media. They infused old settings with a new sense of dynamism while anchoring contemporary spaces in memories of existing practices. Although this technique was already visible in the mid-1800s in publications like El Cascabel and El Museo Universal, in the work of writers like Antonio Flores, or even in prints dating back to the early 1800s,46 it was taken to new heights at the end of the century thanks to advanced reproduction techniques that allowed for a more complex interplay between multiple vignettes and between images and words. Equally significant were the technological innovations conducted in the field of photography, which were fundamental to the conceptual and technical development of the illustrated press. Thus, new archetypes offered points of continuity between preexisting motifs and innovative methods and were shaped by the continuous reassessment and updating of types and scenes. Because of

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

178

Madrid on the move

c­ ostumbrismo’s adaptability and both artists’ and spectators’ literacy with its visual lexicon, it offered historical and aesthetic continuity between periods. This continuity was not exclusive to Madrid’s visual culture; on the contrary, it was visible across different national and cultural contexts, including Mexican costumbrista art and British popular imagery. Whether the visual language of costumbrismo and the picturesque acted in a restrictive and discriminatory manner to reinforce colonial discourses, as occurred in Mexico, or pointed to the forces of change, as happened in British visual culture,47 the establishment of a dialogue between past and present was a defining trait of costumbrismo. Graphic artists, writers, and editors of late nineteenth-century costumbrismo redefined the boundaries and aims of the genre by playing with and capitalising on this cross-temporal dialogue. In addition to creating new types, the illustrators of second costumbrismo updated preexisting ones. Among the figures reproduced in early print culture and later revisited and reworked in Madrid’s illustrated and satirical papers as well as in other printed media such as postcards and photography were the modista (seamstress), horchatero (horchata vendor), aguador (water carrier), sereno (night watchman), castañero (chestnut seller), and el ciego (blind man). Many of these urban figures switched genders as the century progressed.48 Images of the modista (dressmaker) and related trades like the apprentice dressmaker who was called modistilla, oficiala, or aprendiza de modista were rooted in eighteenth-century representations of occupations within the garment industry, such as costureras (seamstresses), lavanderas (laundresses), and street vendors of fabric. In her study of the textile industry and the labour-intensive occupations held by women, Rebecca Haidt observes that during the second half of the eighteenth century women fulfilled a variety of jobs in this industry and in the preparation of raw materials. Nonetheless, vague recording makes it difficult to determine precise numbers of female workers, as these occupations were registered under the general classification of domestic service.49 The modista was an even more controversial figure because, on the one hand, she introduced new luxury items that could corrupt her well-to-do clients, and, on the other, she offered her services outside the licensed gremios (guilds).50 Because she operated on the margins of the organised garment industry, she hid the instruments of her trade – as in an illustration from Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla (ca. 1780), in which her tools are hidden in a box that is covered with flowers (figure 4.5).51 This secrecy marked a fundamental difference with other workers and street vendors featured in collections such as Colección de Trajes (Collection of costumes, 1777–83) or ‘Los vendedores de Madrid’ (Vendors of Madrid, 1848), who openly displayed the tools of their trade to make their occupations identifiable.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Sketching social types 179

4.5  Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla, Modista (dressmaker) in Colección de trajes sus dominios, vol. 5 (Madrid, 1777–83)

The modista gained prominence in Madrid’s popular lithographs and satirical caricatures of the 1860s and 1870s, appearing in works from many including Francisco Ortego and especially Pellicer (figure 4.6). She continued to be represented in popular print culture until the turn of the century. The modista of second costumbrismo retained some of the features of previous representations. Her occupation continued to determine her social status and grant her relative independence and access to privileged sectors of society as well as knowledge of European fashion. As with earlier depictions of dressmakers, she was portrayed wearing an elaborate headdress and several layers of fabric, and she held a customary makeshift bundle of cloth in one hand. But the defining feature of the social type was her ability to arouse male attention as she walked through the city streets. Along with the modista’s customary attire and her baggage – as seen in a 1872 sketch from Pellicer, captioned ‘¡Bien dicen! cada una tiene sus líos’ (So they say! each one has their bundle/trouble) – she was frequently positioned in both illustrations and brief journalistic pieces as someone who

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

180

Madrid on the move

4.6  Josep Lluís Pellicer, ‘Las modistas’, El Mundo Cómico, 2 (10 November 1872), 4

was highly visible in public space, positioned close to men, and predisposed to romantic exchanges. Some writers and artists even suggested that she accepted monetary favours, thus calling her reputation into question. The word lío in the Pellicer caption alludes to both the bundle of clothing that the modista carries and the romantic trouble that might await her.52 While the modista had the potential to corrupt male behaviour, her presence was both critiqued (though so was male indecency) yet justified, as she played a fundamental role in the flourishing fashion industry. This was, after all, a time when the tailoring and dressmaking industry thrived. Between 1863 and 1877, the number of clothes-related businesses and workshops managed by women in Madrid increased from fifty-six to 266, the majority of which were located in the vicinity of the Puerta del Sol.53 With her journeys to and from the workshop and clients’ households, the seamstress would indeed have been highly visible in public space. In addition, the first developments in sewing technology occurred throughout these decades. The first sewing machine was introduced in Spain in 1854



Sketching social types 181

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

by William Grower and William Baker of the United States.54 Between 1876 and 1886, at least twelve new or improved sewing machines were introduced by Spanish, US, Swiss, and German inventors. These machines became increasingly specialised, as with one, for instance, that was built for sewing espadrille soles, a customary form of footwear in Spain.55 The latest improvements in sewing machines were advertised in the press, informing readers where in Madrid they could purchase these machines and their associated products.56 In tandem with these developments, publications geared towards women flourished throughout the late nineteenth century, and magazines like La Moda Elegante Ilustrada (founded in 1842 and revamped in the 1860s following its purchase by Abelardo de Carlos) and El Correo de la Moda (published in Madrid from 1851 to 1892 with Ángela Grassi serving as its director from 1867 to 1883) proved to be successful businesses. Thus, the urban figure of the modista was tied to decades of labour history in both clothing/textiles and fashion, the latter of which was in the late nineteenth century becoming a particularly profitable industry with commercial ramifications that extended well beyond dresswear. Unlike the visual culture of the seamstress in British imagery, the Spanish modista was rarely depicted in the penurious conditions of her workshop.57 In Madrid, the modista was a quintessentially public figure, though she conducted her trade behind closed doors, from measuring and fitting to creating patterns and sewing. Although a handful of depictions exist of women working inside the workshop, the modista was most often linked to public space and was frequently portrayed as a lively young worker who was out and about but not on a leisurely stroll. Whether making a living through her trade or making her way up the social ladder, the modista relied on the instrument of the street as a fundamental part of her trade. The modista, therefore, transgressed social spheres as she moved from her work environment to the privileged spaces of her clients, or when she managed both local textiles and European fashions.58 Not only did she have access to different echelons of society but she transgressed them herself. Accounts of the working life of the modista described how she could rise from a lowly modistilla or trainee to an aspiring middle-class modista. Illustrations of the modista, therefore, moved between drawing attention to her questionable reputation to focusing on her diligence to work rather than waste time. With the latter focus, these papers, geared towards bourgeois readers, endowed the modista with traits of their own class, such as modesty and industriousness. Brief poems and stories distinguished between the discreet modista modesta (modest seamstress) and the feisty and street-smart modista, who moved up in the world due to her diligence at work as well as her willingness to accept favours from

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

182

Madrid on the move

men.59 Illustrated print culture also toyed with this play of words between modesta and modista. Pellicer depicted the modesta as a timid woman walking at a slow pace and looking down to avoid drawing attention to herself. Modistas, on the other hand, were depicted as having a cocky stance.60 Modesty was a fundamental attribute of the bourgeoise and even more so among well-to-do women who navigated the line between displaying social status and being ostentatious.61 While the modista’s presence on the city streets brought her reputation into question, she also embodied the bourgeois ideal of industriousness. Her potential transformation from assistant to workshop owner was reminiscent of the middle-class ideal of the self-made man. This connection is exemplified in a piece called ‘Galería de tipos. La modistilla’ (Gallery of Types. The dressmaker trainee), published in Blanco y Negro in 1893, which recounted the visual and social transformation of a woman from hard-working apprentice in Madrid to elegant seamstress (figure 4.7).62 The article described the different ranks in the dressmaker’s workshop and the mishaps a young trainee could experience. Although the article adopted a condescending tone and paused on the modista’s sexual appeal and potential lack of respectability, its overall focus was on the nature of social mobility and changing social and gender relations. The increased public presence and social standing of dressmakers was also palpable in the remarkable cartes de visites of dressmakers dating from the 1860s that have survived thanks to the vast collection of photographic portraits and visiting cards amassed by the artist Manuel Castellano from the 1850s to the mid-1870s. Some annotations identified various women as dressmakers and were also an expression of the dressmaker’s development from a trade to a more skilled and identifiable ­occupation, especially in urban centres.63 While these moral prescriptions restricted working women, modistas were fundamental to the growth of market commodities and luxury items. Modistas themselves capitalised on this importance and exploited the wellknown typology of their trade. From the 1870s, modistas advertised their services in newspapers and almanacs. For instance, a full-page advertisement of Emilia Abad de Martí’s workshop, located in the vicinity of the Puerta del Sol, was printed in Almanaque Cómico for two consecutive years, in 1877 and 1878 (figure 4.8). Abad de Martí was a reputed modista credited in 1878 with creating a girdle to support pessaries, as recorded by the Spanish Society of Gynaecologists and later announced in the press.64 From 1876 to 1878, she advertised her skill in making women’s and children’s clothing in several of Madrid’s leading newspapers, marketing her shop as an atelier for both expansive and modest budgets.65 In the advertisement featured in the 1877 almanac she wore the typical garments of her trade, an elaborate headpiece and multiple layers of fabric. The advertisement

4.7  José Cuchy, ‘Galería de tipos. La modistilla’, Blanco y Negro, 122 (2 September 1893), 589–90

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

184

Madrid on the move

4.8  Almanaque festivo para el año de 1877 (Madrid: Murcia y Martí, 1876)

was geared towards ‘las señoras más elegantes’ (the most elegant women), as well as towards businesses looking to arrange their displays and sample collections. But her main selling point was her knowledge of international trends, specifically in German and Parisian designs and stitched works ‘que vienen del extranjero’ (that come from abroad). Thus, in just a few words and by capitalising on the visual typology of the modista, these advertisements captured her main selling points: her knowledge of consumerism and transnational networks of commerce and fashion.

Sketching social types 185

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



4.9  La modista felicita a ud. las pascuas de navidad (The dressmaker wishes you a happy Christmas), ca. 1900–20. Felicitaciones de Navidad de oficios. Modistas. Cromolithography on paper

In an extension of the practice of self-advertisement through reliance on a visual typology, some tradespeople in the early twentieth century began distributing Christmas cards in which they asked for el aguinaldo, a g­ ratuity typically given to workers during the festive season. A Christmas card from a modista (figure 4.9) dating from the early 1900s shows her with the typical box of her trade – showcased in prints dating back to the eighteenth century (as with the seamstress in figure 4.5). Yet here, rather than covering the tools of her trade with a makeshift bundle or flowers, she boldly displays a box labelled ‘modas’ (fashions) in large elaborate lettering. This imagery flouts the typology, using it for commercial purposes, and exploiting the modista’s traits as imprinted in the audience’s collective memory: her presence in public space (she is on a sidewalk), her sexual appeal (she shows her heels, and the colour and pattern of her dress draw attention to her figure), and the care given to her own attire (she wears an updated headpiece and fitted short coat).

186

Madrid on the move

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Then and now: the benefits of nostalgia Georges Didi-Huberman writes that to look at an image is to look at time. The only way to observe a picture of the past is to come to terms with the anachronistic nature of our relationship with images. Whereas an image persists in time and will most definitely outlive us, we – as spectators and critics – are the fragile elements in the equation. At the same time, an image only becomes real when it acquires meaning in the memory of the spectator.66 As spectators we are continuously confronted with the problem of time. So were nineteenth-century illustrators when they observed or revisited representations of the past. Their reinterpretations of costumbrista typology provide insight into the ways in which they looked at history and the meanings it acquired in their memory. One of costumbrismo’s defining traits was the inclusion of conventionalised captions alongside types and customs – antaño y hogaño (then and now), de ayer y de hoy (of yesteryear and today), or Madrid que se va (Madrid that is fading). Notes of nostalgia were woven into multiple representations of costumbrista scenes, sometimes explicitly as seen in expressions like antaño y hogaño, at other times subliminally, as in the use of the visual nomenclature of costumbrismo. The old and the new, the past and the present, were part and parcel of both costumbrismo and the modernising process, and they worked together to put the spotlight on change and the passing of time. At first glance, concepts like nostalgia or yesteryear may seem to contradict that of modernisation, and indeed this paradox yielded some of the binary divides that have characterised the literature of modernity: tradition/newness, past/present. Recollection and nostalgia were inherent features of the modernising process, both in Spain and abroad. Unpacking these dualisms allows us to reframe cultural production and its relation to collective memory in terms of interdependence and as the result of multiple vertical influences, which included but were not limited to dominant ideologies of nation imposed from above. This section posits that references to a bygone era, a quintessential part of costumbrismo and Madrid’s print culture throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, can be reframed using terms like confluence and hybridity. This vantage point is more consistent with how nineteenth-century chroniclers expressed concerns about time, change, and experience. Depictions of national and local customs played an important role in projects of nation-building across Europe and the Americas throughout the nineteenth century. While visual representations of the past exploded in this period and shaped what citizens thought about their national pasts,67 recent scholarship proposes moving beyond the frameworks of nationalism. Chiara



Sketching social types 187

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

de Cesari and Ann Rigney write that ‘globalized communication and timespace compression, post-colonialist, transnational capitalism, large-scale migration, and regional integration: all of these mean that national frames are no longer the self-evident ones they used to be in daily life and identity formation’.68 In nineteenth-century Madrid, meanings of the modern and the past, and of the foreign and the vernacular, were negotiated in myriad ways and were not only the result of a project of nation-building or a means through which to resist progress. At the heart of representations of the capital’s public life and customs was, precisely, the interworking of collective remembering and daily rituals, and of local and transcultural practices. In this context of postnationalism, collective remembering, and globalised economies and fashions, what role, then, does the concept of tradition play? Like other thorny concepts shaped by critical debates, tradition is more than the invention and promotion of a set of national values. Pertti Anttonen argues that ‘since the concepts of tradition and modern are fundamentally modern, what they aim to and are able to describe, report, and denote is epistemologically modern’.69 The concepts of tradition and modernisation are inexorably linked and acquire meaning when they operate together. Rather than treating tradition as a regression, then, we should focus on the rituals and representations that nineteenth-century audiences viewed as shared traditions, that is, as entities anchored in a collective past. The interdependence of tradition and the modern can enhance readings of costumbrismo and Spanish popular culture more broadly.70 Depictions of types and customs acquire relevance to the viewer when they engage with the present in some way. A common sentiment that resonated with writers and artists was the feeling of living in a period of transition. Cultural theorist Marshall Berman identified the paradoxically concurrent sentiments of unity, maelstrom, and ambiguity as distinctive to the experience of modernity.71 Although his reading of modernity as contradiction has been disputed, this feeling of being caught between different time periods permeated several forms of cultural production in Spain, from the literary and visual accounts of the Puerta del Sol to the imagery that drew on the antaño y hogaño dialectic. In Spain, authors manipulated and juxtaposed multiple temporalities, not because they were ‘dupes of modernity’ but because doing so better served them to express the complexities and contradictions of progress.72 Time is, after all, fundamentally linked to nineteenth-century industrialisation and technological progress. This period saw the rise of new forms of communication, transportation, and timekeeping, forever altering how time was experienced, managed, and even kept. Well before the rise of urbanisation, globalisation, and mass culture, writers like the fifteenth-century Jorge Manrique had recited the adage,

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

188

Madrid on the move

cualquier tiempo pasado fue mejor (all past days are always better).73 In fact, however, nineteenth-century writers noted that criticising the present and longing for a bygone era said more about how humans dealt with progress than about a desire to return to a specific historical period. Nostalgia was a mechanism that audiences used to mediate and represent urban and social change. Several scholars have pointed to the benefits of using nostalgia in this way. Svetlana Boym distinguishes between two ways of looking at the past. On the hand, she talks about a type of renewing nostalgia that requires a certain level of self-destruction, and on the other, she acknowledges the existence of a contemplative nostalgia that recognises that what has been lost will never be recovered.74 In the face of modernisation, ­nostalgia, ultimately, addressed the passing of time. It had the potential to offer a sense of continuity, allowing people to reposition themselves and their memories within time and space.75 In relation to nineteenth-century literature, Noël Valis argues that nostalgia was an ambiguous expression of loss and mourning that mythicised certain objects and became associated with localness and femininity.76 That said, nostalgia need not be negative or limited to fantasies of returning to a preindustrial past. Rather, it had the potential to foster intercultural exchange and self-fashioning, and it led to a productive dialogue between the past and the present and between individual and collective subjectivity.77 Besides evoking an idealised memory of something lost – be it a place, a sense of tradition, or a historical era – nostalgia also involved a desire to resolve the tension between looking backwards and looking forwards. The pervasive presence of the past in Madrid’s visual culture, be it through words, costumbrista tropes, or stock images, not only pointed towards past histories but highlighted the way in which these histories related to the future. Nostalgia and awareness of the past, when brought into conversation with present-day concerns, became essential components of Madrid’s modernising process. Audiences dealt with urban change through mechanisms that relied more on continuity than on rupture. The act of looking backwards could be productive or recalcitrant, but it was always brought into conversation with the present and provoked a conversation about the future and one’s place in the world and in time. An illustration depicting Madrid’s popular Café Suizo exemplifies how urban archetypes put the past into dialogue with the present (figure 4.10). The image shows the entrance of the café located on the corner of Calle de Alcalá and Calle de los Peligros (present-day Calle de Sevilla), in the vicinity of the Puerta del Sol. It was printed in 1870 following the latest change of government, which had recently passed to Amadeo I of the House of Savoy, whose brief reign would last until 1873. Several urban archetypes are shown convening on the busy pavement outside the café and beneath

Sketching social types 189

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



4.10  Tomás Capuz, ‘Madrid. La esquina de la Calle de los Peligros’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 29 (15 December 1870), 464

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

190

Madrid on the move

the new gaudy street sign that recently replaced a more subtle décor. This illustration works on two levels. First, it relies on feelings of nostalgia. The opening lines of the accompanying text emphasise that the sketch is devoted to ‘el Madrid de nuestros padres, al Madrid que se va’ (the Madrid of our parents, to the Madrid that is fading). The use of italics suggests the theme of a bygone past is a recurrent, familiar subject. Second, the image draws attention to codified social types, both old and new. This illustration is not merely an attempt to document a fleeting past nor solely a satirical critique of a new yet ill-fated political turnover. Indeed, although all these aspects coalesce, what is important is the acute awareness of nostalgia and the lexicon of costumbrismo. The figure and its accompanying text reflect on present-day concerns through remembrance, which is accentuated through the references to types and even one to the late writer and social commentator Mariano José de Larra, a key representative of the past. The image, furthermore, creates connections between opposed figures: ‘la gran señora con el haraposo mendigo, el finchado caballero con la vendedora de periódicos, el lacayo con el duque, el cesante con el ministro, el chulo con la cocotte’ (the grand lady with the ragged beggar, the stuck-up gentleman with the newspaper vendor, the unemployed civil servant with the minister, the chulo with the cocotte). It questions dualisms and, more importantly, draws connections between a number of dichotomies – the past and the present, high and low culture, the bourgeoisie and the underclasses, the foreign and the local. This effect is achieved through costumbrismo’s wellknown aesthetic conventions and the nostalgic undertones of the text, which presupposes that the city has retained some key traits despite its multiple transformations: ‘Madrid se va pero se queda. La decoración ha cambiado pero la comedia es la misma’ (Madrid is fading but stays the same. The decoration has changed but the comedy remains). Illustrations of costumbrista-inspired types and scenes pointed not only towards the past but towards the processes that produced change. As Lynda Nead has argued in relation to visual culture in Victorian London, picturesque motifs in metropolitan settings were not mere ‘picturesque props’ but came to embody ‘the forces of change, rather than of rural continuity. … The signs of the metropolitan picturesque are thus signs of modernity; they are signs of a changing urban geography and of altered spatial relations’.78 Similarly, Madrid’s visual culture was rooted in past conventions that were reworked and updated, putting the past and the present into dialogue in original ways. Whereas the past persisted as a ‘spectral presence’ in nineteenth-century London, it persisted as a concrete and familiar presence in Madrid. Illustrators and writers drew attention to the conventions of the costumbrista aesthetic and relied on nostalgia to further underscore the presence of codified types. This practice reveals once again

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Sketching social types 191

4.11  Luis José Sartorius, Plano de la antigua y nueva Puerta del Sol, con la planta y numeración de las casas a que afecta la reforma, ca. 1840–56. Map

the ­importance not only of content and subject matter but of form and the visual recourses used by artists. Writers and artists were not the only ones to use the then-and-now narrative to convey the complexities of time. Mapmakers and engineers mirrored similar temporal juxtapositions in their urban designs. A map of the Puerta del Sol dating from 1856 represents an insightful example of how the present, past, and future converged in a single document (figure 4.11). Using a common technique of the period, the map depicted several temporalities on the same page, along with the specific locations of the buildings and sites that were due to be torn down or altered. The mapmaker specifically marked the temporal confluence through the juxtaposition of colours, but also through the wording of the title: ‘Plano de la antigua y nueva Puerta del Sol’ (Map of the old and new Puerta del Sol). As argued by Jon May and Nigel Thrift, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, time and space not only contracted but also expanded, sped up and slowed down, and moved in several different directions.79 The map is a candid, easily apprehensible visual manifestation of the ‘time-space compression’. This interest in capturing this then-and-now narrative also carried over into the press. In 1859, El Mundo Pintoresco

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

192

Madrid on the move

reprinted a map of the square in an impressive centre spread that portrayed overlapping moments on a single surface and was meant to help readers visualise the latest alterations to the project, which, by this point, the gazette considered to have been ‘manoseado’ (pawed over) too many times.80 Representing different temporalities on the surface of a single map was also the result of more pragmatic considerations. Mapmakers relied on earlier designs as a blueprint for present and future projects.81 For example, Carlos María de Castro drew on former maps for his Ensanche de Madrid. Anteproyecto (Expansion of Madrid. Preliminary project, 1868); Fermín Delmas juxtaposed different time periods for his 1856 map of the Puerta del Sol and its surrounding areas; and José Pilar Morales even attempted to convey the ongoing renovations of the Ensanche in his Plano de Madrid (Map of Madrid, 1866).82 The urbanist and writer Ildefonso Cerdà was a pioneer in advancing and promoting innovative schemes of urbanisation. In his massive treatise on urbanisation, dating from 1867, he described the times using the term transition. He pointed to the grappling between the past with its rooted traditions, the present with its created interests, and the future with its noble aspirations and rushing.83 The then-and-now narrative was an important mechanism used across genres by urbanists, mapmakers, illustrators, and chroniclers to convey the complexities of change. Instances of nostalgia, whether addressed through maps, brief articles, or sketches, were indicative of transition and encouraged spectators to reflect on their position in space and in time.

Fountains of memory, trains of movement: popular culture in the making This dialogue between the past and the present emerged in a number of representations that, at first glance, seemed to lack elements of urbanisation. Images of fountains and aguadores (water carriers) were among these depictions. Water carriers were a familiar social type and appeared in collections of the late 1700s and early 1800s, such as in Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla’s Colección de trajes de España (Collection of costumes of Spain, 1777–83) and Juan Carrafa’s Colección de trajes de España (1832), where they typically appeared with a jug and later with a barrel, the tools of their trade (figures 4.12 and 4.13). By the 1870s, the theme was well worn and put the spotlight on a mercantile structure that was gradually being replaced by a capitalistic system.84 These kinds of images were not simply nostalgic sketches. They formed part of the capital’s visual culture and involved looking both backwards – at real and remembered places – and forwards, towards the long-term effects of urban and social growth.

Sketching social types 193

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



4.12  Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla, ‘Aguador de compra’, Colección de trajes de España, tanto antiguos como modernos que comprehende todos los de sus dominios, vol. 5 (Madrid, 1777–83)

4.13  Juan Carrafa, ‘Aguador’, Colección de trajes de España 1832 (Madrid: Calcografía Nacional, 1825)

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

194

Madrid on the move

While Madrid’s water supply improved significantly with the construction of a modern canal system during the reign of Isabel II, aguadores continued to be part of the capital’s workforce throughout the nineteenth century. As observed by Antonio Bonet, they existed well into the twentieth century, and their work increased during dry spells and as taller buildings were constructed, in which water did not reach the upper stories. The trade was regulated by the municipal authorities and divided into two different categories: aguadores who carried barrels to provide water to households, and those who sold water on the street.85 Madrid’s public fountains also received attention in foreign print media, and in 1876 the Illustrated London News depicted a fountain scene called ‘Sketches in Madrid. The water supply of Madrid’, which was printed beneath a depiction of the capital’s Octroi, or the site where tax was levied, as in ‘many other cities of Continental Europe’ (figure 4.14). The fountain scene portrayed men refilling and carrying water barrels. While both sketches – the fountain scene and the Octroi – depicted instances of daily life, the accompanying text, instead, concentrated on the festivities that took place to commemorate the king’s defeat over Carlist troops in northern Spain.86 The author himself noted the disparity between illustration and text: ‘The metropolitan city was therefore unusually gay during several days of last week. The Illustrations, however, to which we have now to refer are such as the ordinary aspects of life in Madrid’. The paper, thus, contrasted the text and the image and described the city as a place where pomp coexisted with the rituals of ordinary life. Published in La Ilustración Española y Americana, Francisco Pradilla’s ‘En la fuente de Lavapiés’ (At the fountain of Lavapiés, 1872) depicts workers congregating around a fountain in the working-class neighbourhood of Lavapiés and provides an insightful example of how costumbrista scenes addressed concerns related to urban change (figure 4.15). In addition to describing Madrid’s water supply and the city’s changing social and urban landscape, both the text and the illustration emphasised the importance of the relationships that were consolidated around the fountain. The text discussed ‘la emigración, la expatriación’ (the emigration, the expatriation) of migrants from the northern regions of Asturias and Galicia. The fountain, therefore, served as a meeting point where newcomers could forge personal and professional networks of support. Both the text and the illustration attempted to convey the importance of these associations. These sorts of social liaisons have been described as ‘weak ties’ and ‘ramifications of rural life’ in the urban context.87 The ‘strength of weak ties’ – the community connections and chance encounters that occurred between members of the working class and migrants – was vital in establishing ties that helped newcomers find work.88 The need for such liaisons highlights the

Sketching social types 195

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



4.14  CR (?), ‘Sketches in Madrid’, Illustrated London News (1 April 1876), 333

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

196

Madrid on the move

4.15  Francisco Pradilla, ‘Madrid. En la fuente de Lavapiés’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 23 (16 June 1872), 360

importance of community networks among migrants, who, as emphasised in ‘En la fuente de Lavapiés’, were a central part of the fabric of the city. Immigration to Madrid significantly increased in the latter half of the 1900s and was vital to the city’s process of urbanisation. Although the fountain was a site identified with Madrid’s fleeting past, the opening line of the article diminished its grounding in a historical or grandiose past, concentrating instead on its ordinariness and its potential to strengthen bonds. The article concluded that the hard-working farruco (immigrant from Asturias or Galicia) could eventually leave his bucket – a tool of the trade – to the next newcomer and successfully return to his hometown with a ‘billete de tercera’ (third-class ticket). The reference to the third-class train ticket is not haphazard. It was meant to highlight the working and middle classes’ growing purchasing power and access to commodities, leisure activities, and services. The excursion train became a common theme in popular print culture across Europe throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and, in Spain, the first advertisements promoting inexpensive tickets from Madrid to holiday destinations or nearby towns began in the late 1850s.89 In Spanish this type of train was called tren de recreo (recreational train) or tren económico (inexpensive train) and comically dubbed tren exprés, tren



Sketching social types 197

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

esprés, or tren expreso (express train). It was at once a vehicle of progress and a space for social interaction and even amorous dalliances.90 The 1880s saw the rise of another comical turn, the tren botijo (jug train) and botijo expres (jug express), a reference to passengers transporting botijos of water to cool off during the summer journey.91 The botijo was an identifiable artefact and familiar object linked to the neighbourhood fountain and the Romería de San Isidro, the festivities commemorating the patron saint of Madrid. Graphic artists skilfully fused the subject matter of the third-class train with costumbrista typologies and artefacts like the botijo. In an 1876 vignette titled ‘Los trenes de recreo. De Madrid a Santander, ¡120 reales!’ (Recreational trains. From Madrid to Santander, ¡120 reales!), Pellicer experimented with these themes and juxtaposed different snapshots of a train journey from the capital to the coastal city of Santander (figure 4.16). He sequenced and labelled the episodes with handwritten notation in their lower corners, in an innovative layout that anticipated Madrid Cómico’s customary centrefolds of the 1880s. The oval-shaped image in the centre of the composition contrasted with other scenes that were crowded with people and personal items. The caption below read ‘uno de los panoramas’ (one of the panoramas), a satirical pun parodying Castille’s barren landscape, which, conversely, was represented in such a way as to evoke a contemporary feel and brought to mind the impressive city views that were more common to the lavish illustrated magazine. The illustration also highlighted the sheer number of people that had access to the train, as conveyed by the presence of overcrowded coaches and stations, images of water jugs, and the transference of the popular expression ‘aguado va’ – a phrase used to warn passers-by in towns and cities that one was about to throw waste onto the street – to the modern setting of the train. The recreational train proved to be a fertile topic for popular culture and entertainment geared towards the urban classes. Because of its costumbrista nomenclature and intercultural nature, the tren botijo had the potential to cross over to various fields of cultural production and entertainment. It appeared in different formats from travel guides, poetry, and theatrical pieces to printed ephemera, postcards, and zarzuelas.92 In the 1890s, the tren botijo became a staple in the popular magazine Blanco y Negro, and it was later featured in a popular postcard series edited by Hauser y Menet, one of Madrid’s main photographic publishing houses.93 In 1899–1904, the studio reproduced a series of fifty postcards with illustrations that were originally published in Blanco y Negro. The postcard ‘El tren botijo’ (The jug train) showed an illustration by the artist Carlos Ángel Díaz Huertas, originally published in Blanco y Negro in July 1897, depicting the third-class passengers with their customary water jugs as they

Madrid on the move

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

198

4.16  Josep Lluís Pellicer, ‘Los trenes de recreo’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 35 (22 September 1876), 180

Sketching social types 199

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



4.17  ‘El tren botijo’, postcard printed by Hauser y Menet, Madrid, and sent to St Leonards-on-Sea, England, in 1902

boarded the train. Senders typically wrote brief messages on postcards to provide first-hand experience and respond to what was being represented. One sender of this postcard gave the image a French title, ‘Le train de Plaisir’.94 Another postcard, this one dating from 1902 and addressed to a recipient in St Leonards in southern England, included a short explanatory heading, ‘The Excursion’, just above the Spanish-language title (figure 4.17). While excursion trains were a frequent theme in British print culture, the sender of the postcard thought that the picture, and the jugs in particular, required further clarification and, thus, explained to the recipient in a brief note below the image that this was a third-class train where passengers cooked. These kinds of clipped messages, typical of the medium of the postcard, functioned as captions and added new meanings to the pictures that transcended the initial intention of illustrators and publishers.95 While the sender’s assessment of this 1902 postcard was not entirely accurate, it evidences an interest in recognising and translating the scene. More than a linguistic translation, it was a cultural one that put the spotlight on the local aspects of the scene as well as on the international phenomenon of travelling for leisure. Blanco y Negro enjoyed wide success in the 1890s, in large part due to its representation of this sort of festive subject matter.96 The jug (a motif linked to the lower classes) and topics like the fountain, popular religious festivities like romerías, and aguadores (water carriers) served as agents of recall

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

200

Madrid on the move

4.18  ‘El tren botijo’, Blanco y Negro, 175 (8 September 1894), 576

that audiences could retrieve from a shared pool of memories. These motifs were even deployed in innovative and embellished headings that merged modern typography with recognisable elements such as the train and the jug (figure 4.18). The texts and images mentioned thus far sometimes trivialised the struggles of the underclasses and adopted a mocking and patronising tone, and at other times tended towards idealism, but overall they exposed a profound engagement with the effects of modernisation in relation to the past, and with the new forms of leisure and mass culture it contributed to producing. The overlapping of the past and the present dissolved in these representations, which did not seem to rely on the then-and-now narrative technique. What surfaced here was a fusion of dualisms – the old and the new, the local and the cosmopolitan (embodied by the symbolic artefacts of the jug and the train), aesthetic motifs rooted in costumbrismo and modern media like photography and innovative typesetting. To go back to Erll and Rigney’s premise, cultural memory only becomes collective through a process whereby memories are shared through symbolic artefacts. The urban middle classes were educated in the reading of these kinds of visual narratives and capable of drawing associations beyond oversimplified clichés and stereotypes. Thus, images of fountains and el tren botijo should not be read in isolation but, instead, framed as part of the period’s broader visual landscape and in the context of ongoing discussions about transnational practices and memory. The rise of a new culture of consumerism was at the heart of many of these texts and images. The final decades of the nineteenth century were a watershed moment in the formation of a middle-class, popular culture in Madrid. Between 1870 and 1920, the number of periodicals increased from 450 to 2,300.97 Lou Charnon-Deutsch locates this move towards mass media in the growth of the mass press of the 1890s, as rapidly growing print runs and the reduced prices of newspapers such as El Imparcial and Blanco y Negro set the foundations for mass media in the next century.98 Stephanie Sieburth notes that the polemic surrounding high and low culture is an old



Sketching social types 201

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

one that can be traced back to Cervantes’s Don Quixote and even antiquity. However, it was in the nineteenth century that culture took on new meanings and the dominant bourgeois class began to perceive mass culture as a threat to its own social hegemony and to pure and authentic forms of art. Despite mass culture’s uncomfortable presence in the late nineteenth century, the lower classes became a subject of interest and fantasy for the bourgeoisie, and novels like Benito Pérez Galdós’s 1881 La desheredada put the spotlight on popular lithography and pictured the lower classes consuming a variety of printed media.99 Illustrations of spaces like the tren botijo were, indeed, produced for middle- and upper-middle-class readers. Not only did they reflect the privileged classes’ interest in the practices of Madrid’s lower classes, but they highlighted the fact that the popular classes were gradually accessing new services and forms of leisure. In fact, many untrained readers had their first encounters with the written word through newspapers sold on streets and images reproduced in almanacs and calendars.100 Article 4 of the 1883 press law reflected this increase in the circulation of illustrated printed media. Some scholars have questioned the degree to which the lower echelons of society may have copied cultural representations of their class.101 Others have posited the existence of a certain degree of inter-class association in public and leisure spaces.102 What is clear is that the visibility of printed media in public, together with its circulation in private spaces, was fundamental in setting the foundations for early mass culture at the turn of the century. In the late 1880s and 1890s, debates surrounding high and low culture also emerged in the field of theatre, which shared many themes with illustrated print culture. As Carmen del Moral has pointed out, new forms of entertainment such as the teatro por horas (theatre by the hour) and género chico were marketed at reduced prices and staged at some of the capital’s most popular theatres, such as the Apolo and the Zarzuela.103 These theatrical representations had detractors who feared that traditional plays would not be able to compete with the less refined offerings and cheaper pieces, with one critic branding these forms ‘literatura industrial’ (industrial literature).104 In a similar vein, in 1896, La Ilustración Española y Americana denounced the theatrical piece titled El tren botijo that had been performed during the Festivities of San Isidro, the capital’s patron saint. This piece was first staged in 1888 and was described by one paper as ‘un viaje cómico lírico’ (a lyrical-comical journey).105 One critic, author Eduardo Bustillo, criticised the use of popular and familiar stereotypes and the uncouth way in which they tapped into the audience’s taste by appealing to emotion rather than intellect. In short, he believed this kind of theatre to be an excessively easy form of entertainment.106 Bustillo

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

202

Madrid on the move

was, perhaps unknowingly, outlining some of the requirements of massproduced popular culture – it should be easy to access, interpret, and relate to, and its themes should have the potential to cross over to other forms of entertainment. Satirical magazines like Madrid Cómico were subjected to the same sort of criticism by detractors who supported higher expressions of art and literature. Some of these critics, nonetheless, had no qualms in contributing to satirical gazettes, as was the case of Bustillo himself, who wrote for the satirical press but bemoaned the commercial techniques of popular theatre. That writers and sketchers contributed to journals and genres across the cultural spectrum reveals that they, too, were motivated by financial concerns and not only by recognition. While representations related to the popular classes like the tren botijo must be adopted by bourgeois culture in order to become normalised, these representations exposed concerns about the fluctuating boundaries between social classes and high and low art, and the impact these social and cultural transformations had on how culture was produced, accessed, and enjoyed. Ultimately, el tren botijo was an expression of this concern. Cultural entrepreneurs understood the need to adapt in order to survive the dictates of fashion and the changing dynamics of taste. A fundamental aspect of early costumbrismo and journalism was its collective nature; as a result, the individual authorship and the uniqueness of the piece lost relevance.107 The viewer’s experience prevailed over the persona of the author. This, too, was an aspect that mass-produced culture and costumbrismo shared. When a reader leafed through the pages of a gazette, looked at a social type within a large centrefold, or momentarily observed the typography on a label, it was the experience of the product as a whole that mattered. Authors and artists could surely strengthen their reputation by contributing to a popular magazine or editorial venture, but their identity was lost amidst the pages of a newspaper. This period was important for the professionalisation of occupations like the journalist, the editor, the book author, and the graphic artist – a process that culminated  in the early decades of the twentieth century. Furthermore, artists faced the challenge of moving from a patronage- to a market-driven system, and they acknowledged the limitations of high art, which seemingly lost its function in a world where print culture abounded.108 This interest in d ­ efining the role that cultural actors should play in public life is indicative of the growing importance of popular culture. The debate mirrored the porous boundaries between communication and literature, entertainment and art, expediency and paused contemplation. Thus, during a period in which the mechanics of popular culture had not yet been cemented, the boundaries between high and low art were blurred, and it was this grey area that provoked discussion amongst social commentators. It is within



Sketching social types 203

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

this visual landscape that second costumbrismo must be read, as it proved to be an adequate link between the collective experience that costumbrista journalism anticipated in the 1840s and the developing mass culture of the turn of the century. During the second half of the nineteenth century, printed media in conjunction with costumbrista themes mirrored changing social and economic practices and, in order to remain relevant and current, incorporated actors that were already present in society, such as immigrants, the lower classes, working men and women like the seamstress, or followers of foreign fashion. The press and illustrated print culture were fundamental in expressing these transformations, both directly or in a subliminal manner, since they, too, stood on the fringes of academic art and high culture and played a fundamental role in the development of modern popular culture.

Notes

1 Susan Larson argues that there was a synergy between género chico (brief one-act operatic theatrical pieces) and early 1900s film, which at once engaged with modernisation and tradition, and both critiqued and participated in capitalism: ‘Stages of modernity’, 263, 279. 2 On the concept of inter-ocularity, see n. 47 in the introduction. Mey-Yen Moriuchi, in relation to Mexican costumbrismo, posits that the genre was intertextual and interdisciplinary and that its use across multiple formats was fundamental in sustaining its longevity and reinforcing racial types: Mexican Costumbrismo: Race, Society, and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018), 7–8. 3 Regarding the term castizo, Deborah Parsons has noted that the urban connotations of this term are often ignored due to the formulation of lo castizo by the writers of the Generation of 1898. This literary and ideological movement linked the term to the myth of rural Castile, a reading that was subsequently used in the Francoist rhetoric of nation. Parsons notes that the nationalist and nostalgic construction of an authentic idea of Spain actually curtails the ethnic and class marginality from which the castizo originates (A Cultural History of Madrid, 110, n. 29 and 115–16, n. 30). The writings of the Generation of 1898 and Miguel de Unamuno in particular reinforced a view of Spanish society as one swaying between extremes, between tradition and progress, the foreign and the castizo. José Álvarez Junco has noted that the defeat in the SpanishAmerican War was an ideological crisis more than a political and financial one, which was expressed in the ‘acute consciousness’ this generation displayed of the event: ‘History, politics, and culture, 1875–1936’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture, ed. David T. Gies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 73–4. For an overview of the evolution of the term castizo from the sixteenth century to the widespread use of it in

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

204

Madrid on the move

the early twentieth century, see Ana Sofía Pérez-Bustamente Mourier, ‘Cultura popular, cultura intelectual y casticismo’, in Ana Sofía Pérez-Bustamente Mourier and Alberto Romero Ferrer (eds.), Casticismo y literatura (Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz, Servicio de Publicaciones, 1992), 125–63. 4 On costumbrismo and its conservative ideology, see, for example, Luis Beltrán Almería, ‘Algunas consideraciones sobre el concepto de costumbrismo’, in Dolores Thion Soriano-Mollá (ed.), El costumbrismo, nuevas luces (Pau: Presses de l’Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, 2013), 4; Mar Soria López, ‘Modern castiza landscapes: Working women in Zarzuela’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 88:6 (2011), 821–38; José Luis Guijarro Alonso, Cuidado con la pintura. Caricaturas del arte en tiempo de vanguardias: Madrid, 1909–1925 (Madrid: Eutelequia, 2012), 35–6. 5 I build here on Lucy H. Harney’s argument on género chico in her article ‘Controlling resistance, resisting control’, 158, 165. Harney borrows the phrase ‘top-down’ from Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993). 6 Labanyi, Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel, 15. 7 Regarding nineteenth-century chronicles and writers, Geraldine Lawless argues that juxtaposing multiple temporalities was a way of dealing with progress: ‘How to tell time’, in Ginger and Lawless (eds.), Spain in the Nineteenth Century, 74, 80. 8 Charnon-Deutsch, Hold That Pose, 3. 9 Ibid., 77. 10 Michael Iarocci, ‘Romantic prose, journalism, and costumbrismo’, in David T. Gies (ed.), The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 386–8. 11 See Thion Soriano-Mollá (ed.), El costumbrismo; Dolores Thion SorianoMollá, Luis Beltrán Almería, Solange Hibbs-Lissorgues, and Marisa Sotelo Vázquez (eds.), Tradición e interculturalidad: Las relaciones entre lo culto y lo popular (siglos XIX–XX) (Zaragoza: Institución ‘Fernando el Católico’, 2013). For a review of nineteenth-century costumbrismo with emphasis on its transnational nature, see Ana Peñas Ruiz, ‘Revisión del costumbrismo hispánico: Una historia cultural transacional’, in Felipe Martínez-Pinzón and Kari Soriano Salkjelsvik (eds.), Revisitar el costumbrismo: Cosmopolitanismo, pedagogías y modernización en Iberoamérica (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016), 31–52. 12 Leonardo Romero Tobar, prologue to Thion Soriano-Mollá (ed.), El Costumbrismo, 18. 13 Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century collections of images of street vendors include: Juan de la Cruz Cano y Olmedilla, Colección de trajes de España, tanto antiguos como modernos (Madrid: Casa de M. Copin, 1777–88); Antonio Rodríguez, Colección General de los Trages que en la actualidad se usan en España. Principiado en el año 1801 (Madrid: Librería de Castillo, 1801); José Rivelles y Helip, Colección de Trages de España (Madrid: Calcografía Nacional, 1825); and Miguel Gamborino, Los gritos de Madrid (Madrid:



Sketching social types 205

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Calcografía Nacional, 1809–17). For an overview of street vendors from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, see Estampas de ferias y mercados (siglos XVIII a XX) (Valladolid: Caja España, Obra Social, 2005). 14 Fontanella, La imprenta y las letras, 36, 104, 110. 15 Ana Peñas Ruiz, ‘Entre literatura y pintura: Poética pictórica del artículo de costumbres’, in Rodríguez Gutiérrez and Gutiérrez Sebastián (eds.), Literatura ilustrada decimonónica, 625, 631, 634. 16 Martínez-Pinzón and Soriano Salkjelsvik (eds.), introduction to Revisitar el costumbrismo, 7–9. Recent transnational approaches to both visual and literary costumbrismo in Spain and Latin America include Martínez-Pinzón and Soriano Salkjelsvik (eds.), Revisitar el costumbrismo; and Moriuchi, Mexican Costumbrismo. 17 Moriuchi, Mexican Costumbrismo, 4. 18 Peñas Ruiz, ‘Revisión del costumbrismo hispánico’, 31, 40. 19 María de los Ángeles Ayala, ‘Las colecciones costumbristas en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX: Entre la nostalgia y la crítica’, Reivindicar el costumbrismo. Ínsula, 637 (January 2000), 16. 20 Bozal, La ilustración gráfica, 139. 21 Roberto Robert (ed.), Las españolas pintadas por los españoles (Madrid: Imprenta a cargo de J. E. Morete, 1871–72); and Miguel Guijarro (ed.), Las mujeres españolas, portuguesas y americanas, 3 vols (Madrid: Imprenta y Librería de D. Miguel Guijarro, 1872–76). 22 Alicia Cerezo, ‘Faustina Sáez de Melgar y las mujeres “pintadas por sí mismas”: Una representación correctiva de la feminidad y una visión alternativa del ­costumbrismo’, Letras Femeninas, 36:2 (2010), 40. 23 Faustina Sáez de Melgar, introduction to Sáez de Melgar (ed.), Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas (Barcelona: Establecimiento tipográfico – Editorial de Juan Pons, 1881), v–vi. The model of domesticity of the angel in the house was common in Western literature during the nineteenth century. In Spain, this model was known as ángel del hogar and was disseminated through literature and etiquette manuals. See, for example, Sinués de Marco, El ángel del hogar (1859); and Sinués de Marco, Un libro para las damas. On this subject, see Bridget Aldaraca, ‘El ángel del hogar: The cult of domesticity in nineteenth-century Spain’, in Gabriela Mora and Karen S. Van Hooft (eds.), Theory and Practice of Feminist Literary Criticism (Ypsilanti, MI: Bilingual, 1982), 62–87. 24 Ana Mateos, ‘Domesticando el imperio: Género y raza en Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas (1881–1882)’, Hispanic Review, 85:4 (2017), 467–88. Alicia Cerezo observes that there were two competing  narratives in this volume: the texts written by female authors and the appeasing and appealing depictions of women executed by Eusebio Planas. See her article ‘Faustina Sáez de Melgar y las mujeres “pintadas por sí mismas”’, 42. 25 Moriuchi, Mexican Costumbrismo, 3–4. 26 Olimpia Alborad, ‘La mujer de la Habana’, in Sáez de Melgar (ed.), Las mujeres españolas, 84–5.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

206

Madrid on the move

27 Josefa Estévez de G. del Canto, ‘La mujer filipina’, in Sáez de Melgar (ed.), Las mujeres españolas, 510–16. 28 María Mendoza de Vives, ‘La Dida (La nodriza)’, in Sáez de Melgar (ed.), Las mujeres españolas, 86–8. 29 Partzsch, ‘How to be a cultural entrepreneur’, 191–2, 203–4. 30 Fontanella, La imprenta y las letras, 68–9. While this book is not a study of romantic depictions of Spain by foreigners, it is worth noting that European writers and artists promoted picturesque social types and romantic views of Spain, especially in the early and mid-1800s. This contributed to further convoluting the reception and understanding of social types between different countries. For a discussion on the creation of romantic myths and how Spanish writers engaged with European stereotypes, see Xavier Andreu Miralles, El descubrimiento de España: Mito romántico e identidad nacional (Barcelona: Taurus, 2016). 31 Diario de las sesiones de cortes. Senado, 146 (5 July 1883), 2194. 32 Bozal, La ilustración gráfica, 83. 33 Sánchez Vigil, Revistas ilustradas en España, 65. 34 Jorge Urrutia, preliminary study for Las españolas pintadas por los ­españoles … contemporáneas (1871), ed. Roberto Robert (Madrid: Fundación Francisco Largo Caballero, 2008), xiii. 35 ‘El jefe de la mesa de café’, in Andrés Corzuelo (pseud. of Manuel Matoses), Del montón. Retratos de sujetos que se ven en todas partes (Madrid: Imprenta de E. Rubiños, 1887), 21–6; Josep Lluís Pellicer, ‘Los Opulentos’, MUC, 64 (18 January 1874), 2. 36 Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, introduction to Erll and Rigney (eds.), Mediation, Remembering and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, 1 (Utrecht: De Gruyter, 2009). 37 Rigney, ‘Cultural memory studies’, 65. 38 The concept of collective remembering is from James V. Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 39 Haidt, ‘Commodifying place and time’, 15. 40 Emilia Pardo Bazán, ‘En tranvía’, Los Lunes de El Imparcial (24 February 1890); Benito Pérez Galdós, ‘La novela en el tranvía’, La Ilustración de Madrid, 30 November 1871, 343. Pérez Galdós’s novel was published in two instalments; the second was printed in La Ilustración de Madrid, 18 December 1871, 366–7. On this piece, see Elizabeth Amann, ‘Reading (on) the tram: Benito Perez Galdós’ “La novela en el tranvía”’, Orbis Litterarum, 69:3 (2014), 193–214. 41 For more examples of representations of tram passengers, see my study ‘On and off the tram: Contemporary types and customs in Madrid’s illustrated and satirical press (1874–1898)’, in Klich and Zanardi (eds.), Visual Typologies, 60–73. 42 Rodríguez-Galindo, ‘De paseo’, 173–4. 43 See, for example, Pardo Bazán, ‘En tranvía’; and Eugenio Barrón, ‘Mejoras de Madrid. Tranvías o caminos de hierro Americanos’, IEA, 7 (22 February 1877), 125. 44 Corzuelo, Del montón, 91–5.



Sketching social types 207

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

45 Pla Vivas, Ilustración gráfica del siglo XIX, 280–1. 46 For a discussion of types in the late 1700s and early 1800s, see Tara Zanardi, Framing Majismo Art and Royal Identity in Eighteenth-Century Spain (University Park, PA; Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 33–8. 47 Moriuchi argues that nineteenth-century costumbrista art and photography drew on eighteenth-century casta painting: Mexican Costumbrismo, esp. 3–30. In relation to British visual culture, Nead observes that signs of the picturesque pointed to the changing forces of modernization: Victorian Babylon, 32. 48 On the horchatera, see Rodríguez-Galindo, ‘On and off the tram’, 61–4. 49 Haidt, ‘The wife, the maid, and the woman in the street’, 123, 120. 50 Rebecca Haidt, Women, Work and Clothing in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2011), 83, 90. 51 Ibid., 90. 52 See, for example, ‘Un problema’, in Almanaque festivo para el año de 1877 (Madrid: Murcia y Martí, 1876), 89–90; and Eduardo Bustillo, ‘La de los líos’, MC, 153 (23 January 1886), 2. 53 María Cruz del Amo del Amo, La familia y el trabajo femenino en España durante la segunda mitad del siglo XIX (PhD diss., Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2008), 344, 350. 54 Patricio Sáiz, Base de datos de solicitudes de privilegios. España 1826–1876 (Madrid: OPEM-UAM, 2000), http://historico.opem.es. The privilege number was 1208, issued on 20 September 1854. 55 Francisco Cayón, Patricio Sáiz, and Francisco Llorens (eds.), Base de datos de solicitudes de patentes (España, 1878–1939) (Madrid: OEPM-UAM, 2000–2008), http://historico.oepm.es. Joaquín Martín y Jiménez received the invention privilege for this machine on 21 March 1877 (no. 5633 BIS). 56 See, for example, La Ilustración Católica (28 January 1882), 215. This advert promoted a new sewing machine that was compatible with previous models and sold on Calle de Preciados. 57 For a discussion of the poem ‘Song of the Shirt’ by Thomas Hood and representations of the seamstress in British art, see Susan P. Casteras, ‘“Weary stitches”: Illustrations and paintings for Thomas Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” and other poems’, in Beth Harris (ed.), Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2005), 13–40. The idealised painting by Manuel García ‘Hispaleto’, Obrador de modistas ca. 1878 (Museo del Prado) is a rare example of the inside of a workshop. 58 See Haidt, Women, Work and Clothing. 59 See, for example, F. Casellas Pavia, ‘A una modesta modista’, MUC, 157 (23 January 1876). 60 Josep Lluís Pellicer, ‘Las niñas de Madrid’, MUC, 2 (10 November 1872). 61 Catherine Jagoe has explored this double bind and the middle class’s negotiation of luxury within the limits of morality and bourgeois consumption: Ambiguous Angels: Gender in the Novels of Galdós (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 86 and ff.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

208

Madrid on the move

62 Francisco Flores García, ‘Galería de tipos. La modistilla’, ByN, 122 (2 September 1893). Mar Soria López provides an account of the profession of the seamstress in the realist novel and the notion of the ‘self-made woman’: In Her Place: Geographies of Urban Female Labor in Spanish Culture ­(1880–1931) (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010), 118–51. 63 Luisa Sánchez, modista. Colección Castellano, ca. 1862, photograph. Biblioteca Nacional de España, 17-LF/48 (66 V)/5; Retrato de Eulalia Pinedo. Colección Castellano, ca. 1860, photograph. Biblioteca Nacional de España, 17-LF/57 (174). 64 Anales de la Sociedad ginecológica española, vols. 4–5 (Madrid: Imprenta de Alejandro de Gómez Fuentenebro, 1878), 139; La Iberia, 6620 (12 June 1878). 65 See, for example, El Correo de la Moda, 7 (18 February 1876), 56. 66 Georges Didi-Huberman, Ante el tiempo. Historia del arte y anacronismo de las imágenes, trans. Antonio Oviedo, 2nd ed. (Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo editora, 2008), 31–2. 67 Schwartz and Przyblyski (eds.), The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, 233. For a discussion of Spanish stereotypes in the formation of discourses of national identity, see, for example, Manuel Viera de Miguel, ‘Estereotipos nacionales e imágenes de poder en la Exposición Universal de Barcelona de 1888: “Honra y orgullo de la patria española”’, Anales de historia del arte, 23:1 suppl. (June 2013), 19–35. 68 Cesari and Rigney, introduction to Cesari and Rigney (eds.), Transnational Memory, 2–3. The works they refer to are: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983); and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 69 Anttonen, Tradition through Modernity, 12. 70 Luis Beltrán Almería, ‘Apuntes para una teoría de la cultura popular’, in Thion Soriano-Mollá, Beltrán Almería, Hibbs-Lissorgues, and Sotelo Vázquez (eds.), Tradición e interculturalidad, 64–5. 71 Berman, All That Is Solid, 15–6. 72 Lawless, ‘How to tell time’, 74, 80. Lawless also argues that time and its reconfiguration were a central part of literary modernity, as authors like Leopoldo Alas (Clarín) simultaneously expanded and contracted different timescales. See Lawless, Modernity’s Metonyms, esp. xiv–xvii. 73 The Spanish dictum is frequently used in colloquial language. Jorge Manrique used the adage in Coplas por la muerte de su padre (1476). For an overview of this dictum and its uses, see http://cvc.cervantes.es/lengua/refranero/ficha. aspx?Par=58393&Lng=0 (Accessed 1 August 2019). 74 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 75 Janelle L. Wilson, Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2005), 29, 61. 76 Valis, The Culture of Cursilería, 27, 244, 251.



Sketching social types 209

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

77 Tammy Clewell, introduction to Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 1. In relation to Spanish costume films under Francoism, Jo Labanyi posits that they did not represent a regression to the past but were a way of negotiating modernity and their function in relation to the present: ‘Negotiating modernity through the past’, 241–58. 78 Nead, Victorian Babylon, 32. 79 May and Thrift, introduction to Timespace, 10. The concept of ‘time-space compression’ is discussed in chapter 2. 80 V. Barrantes, ‘Nuevo plano de la Puerta del Sol’, El Mundo Pintoresco, 38 (18 September 1859), 304. The map was titled ‘Novísimo plano de la Puerta del Sol’ (300–1). 81 Tres siglos de cartografía madrileña, 1622–1929: Exposición celebrada en el Salón de Columnas del centro Mesonero Romanos (Casa de la Panadería, Plaza Mayor de Madrid) del 1 al 10 de noviembre de 1997 (Madrid: El Consultor de los Ayuntamientos, 1997), 106. 82 Ibid., 116. Fermín Delmas’s 1856 map was titled Plano de las obras de Ensanche y de las alineaciones de la plaza de la Puerta del Sol y calles afluentes. For a later edition of José Pilar Morales, Plano de Madrid, see figure 1.17. 83 Cerdà, Teoría general de la urbanización, 7. 84 Eloy Gómez Pellón, ‘La vida cotidiana de la calle o el descubrimiento artístico de las nuevas alteridades en el siglo XIX. A propósito de la obra de Francisco Ortego y Vereda’. In Tipos y costumbres madrileños de F. Ortego en la Colección UC de Arte Gráfico (Santander: Editorial Universidad de Cantabria, 2011), 17. 85 Antonio Bonet Correa, ‘Madrid y el Canal de Isabel II’, Arbor, 673 (January 2002), 50. This division was also mirrored in the press. For instance, the artist Federico Guisasola depicted the aguador in a building stairwell: ‘Tipos de Madrid – El aguador’, IEA, 44 (24 November 1872), 701. 86 ‘Sketches in Madrid’, Illustrated London News, 1 April 1876, 334. 87 David Ringrose, ‘Madrid, capital imperial (1561–1833)’, in Santos Juliá, David Ringrose, and Cristina Segura (eds.), Madrid. Historia de una capital (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1995), 258–9. Daniel Frost and Donald Shaw argue that the popularity of romantic costumbrismo depended on its success in echoing middle-class anxieties about a changing society that viewed ‘the picturesque “otherness” of traditional customs as a “natural” result of the modernising process’: Donald Shaw, ‘La pintura … festiva, satírica y moral de las costumbres populares’, Romanticismo 6; actas del VI congreso, 302, qtd. in Daniel Frost, ‘Mesonero’s Modern Landscapes’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 6:3 (2005), 323. 88 Rachel Fuchs, Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 6, 129. Also see RodríguezGalindo, ‘Visuality and practices of looking in nineteenth-century Madrid: Representations of the old and modern city in the illustrated press’, 239. 89 See La Época, 3,146 (21 July 1859). For an example of the excursion train in British print culture, see ‘Waiting for the Excursion Train’, Illustrated London

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

210

Madrid on the move

News, 4 September 1880. In relation to the presence of the train in literature, Geraldine Lawless argues that the railway was an expression of modernity and its ailments, representing both progress and the trajectory of modernisation coming to a halt: Modernity’s Metonyms, 4, 9. 90 Marta Palenque, ‘“El tren expreso” en cromos y postales o la gloria de Ramón de Campoamor’, in Rodríguez Gutiérrez and Gutiérrez Sebastián (eds.), Literatura ilustrada decimonónica, 543–83. 91 See, for example, La Iberia, 13730 (9 March 1894); Eduardo Navarro Gonzalvo, ‘El tren botijo. Croquis’, MC, 19 August 1883, 6; and Lois Baldomero, ‘Nuestros grabados’, La Ilustración Nacional, 22 (6 August 1891), 347. 92 Miguel Ramos Carrión, the literary director of El Mundo Cómico and a contributor to publications like La Ilustración Española y Americana and Blanco y Negro, penned the zarzuela De Madrid a Biarritz (viaje económico en tren de ida y vuelta) (From Madrid to Biarritz [inexpensive return train journey]) in 1870. 93 From 1899 to 1904, Hauser y Menet printed a series of fifty postcards featuring illustrations published in Blanco y Negro: Carrasco Marqués, Tarjetas postales ilustradas de Madrid, 92. Romo y Fussel also printed El tren botijo and other postcards from the Blanco y Negro series. 94 El tren botijo, Madrid: Hauser y Menet, ca. 1902. Archivo regional de la Comunidad de Madrid, ES 28079 ARCM 0083R. 95 On this subject see, Esther Milne, Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence (New York: Routledge, 2010). 96 Charnon-Deutsch, Hold That Pose, 77. 97 Botrel, ‘La construcción de una nueva cultura del libro’, 22–3. 98 Charnon-Deutsch, Hold That Pose, 147. 99 Sieburth, Inventing High and Low, 2–3, 10–12. 100 Raquel Gutiérrez Sebastián, ‘La literatura de almanaque’, in Thion SorianoMollá and Urrutia (eds.), De élites y masas, 221. Botrel notes that from 1877 to 1900 literacy increased by fifty-five thousand readers per year, reaching ninety thousand by 1900: ‘La construcción de una nueva cultura del libro’. 101 José Álvarez Junco, ‘Rural and urban popular cultures’, in Graham and Labanyi (eds.), Spanish Cultural Studies, 86. 102 Elena Maza Zorrilla, ‘Nuevas formas y espacios de sociabilidad al filo del siglo XX’, in Gómez-Ferrer Morant and Sánchez García (eds.), Modernizar España, 127–8. 103 Moral Ruiz, ‘Ocio y esparcimiento’, 511. 104 Ibid. The illustrator Juan Comba also explored this polemic in ‘Madrid: Los teatros y sus públicos’, IEA, 1 (8 January 1883), 13. 105 ‘Noticias de espectáculos’, El Día, 492 (28 March 1888). 106 Eduardo Bustillo, ‘Los teatros’, IEA, 19 (22 May 1896), 307. On género chico and its unfavourable reviews, also see Margot Versteeg, De fusiladores y morcilleros: El discurso cómico del género chico (1870–1910) (Amsterdam: Rodopi Portada Hispánica, 2000), 6–10.



Sketching social types 211

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

107 Fontanella, La imprenta y las letras, 79–80. 108 Sieburth, Inventing High and Low, 5, 15, 78. For a discussion of the professionalisation of journalism, see Versteeg, Jornaleros de la pluma, esp. 11–2; Jesús A. Martínez Martín, Vivir de la pluma. La profesionalización del escritor, 1836–1936 (Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2009), 101, 105.

5

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Creating hybrid surfaces: truth, representation, reality/illustration, caricature, photography Humans of New York began as a photography project in 2010. The initial goal was to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers on the street, and create an exhaustive catalogue of the city’s inhabitants. Somewhere along the way, I began to interview my subjects in addition to photographing them. And alongside their portraits, I’d include quotes and short stories from their lives. Taken together, these portraits and captions became the subject of a vibrant blog. HONY [Humans of New York] now has over twenty million followers on social media, and provides a worldwide audience with daily glimpses into the lives of strangers on the streets of New York City. —Brandon Stanton

This brief testimonial about the online project Humans of New York was written by the project’s creator, photographer Brandon Stanton, who in 2010 set out to capture the daily life of anonymous New Yorkers. The project brings together hundreds of photographic portraits – from immigrants and street buskers to recent graduates and working mothers. Followed by millions of internet users worldwide, the photoblog evidences the far-reaching appeal of this kind of approach to human behaviour and public life. It also shares a clear resemblance with nineteenth-century albums of social types like Heads of the People; or, Portaits of the English (1841), Les français peints par eux-mêmes (The French described by themselves, 1841), and Los españoles pintados por sí mismos (The Spanish described by themselves, 1844). That Stanton was compelled to catalogue and describe the lives and daily habits of ordinary people reveals the extent to which this method of organising knowledge is ingrained in our contemporary culture and epistemological narratives. Whether it takes the form of sketches, photojournalism, or photo blogging, this kind of method creates a connection with the audience with minimal stylistic recourses. Humans of New York easily bypasses the political incorrectness that comes with stereotyping and labelling in our contemporary society. It succeeds in this regard because of the ‘significant absence’, to use Peter Burke’s words again, of one fundamental



Creating hybrid surfaces 213

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

element: headings. In the nineteenth century, headings and c­ aptions were crucial in providing readers with additional information and establishing links between multiple visual frames. Twenty-first-century audiences, on the other hand, are preoccupied with how labels operate. ‘Humans’ is, after all, the broadest category of classification, capable of subsuming people of different ethnicities, nationalities, gender, and social backgrounds. With the exception of the title Humans of New York, there are no visible signs of stereotyping or pigeonholing in the captions displayed below each portrait, an absence that enhances public perception of the project as an open and participative account of daily life in a vibrant city. The portraits do, however, continue to be visual representations that synthesise and systematically organise knowledge. They also speak to the millions of viewers who can read this straightforward formula and recognise themselves in the individuals portrayed. In this interplay between text and image, the readership’s complicity and understanding of the codes used (or circumvented) is crucial. A comparable effort to synthesise information and reflect on how society visually represented itself can be appreciated in the numerous sketches of types that were broadcasted throughout the nineteenth century. This chapter explores depictions of street types in Madrid’s popular print culture and examines their ambiguous relationship with notions of reality, on the one hand, and their potential to set the technological and conceptual foundations for mass-produced culture, on the other. The visual and textual dynamics of illustrated print culture during the late nineteenth century relied on codified types and aesthetic formulae with which audiences were conversant. The interplay between texts, captions, and sketches reveal a fundamental concern for artists and writers of the time: their preoccupation with form and the inner workings of the genre of costumbrismo. By drawing attention to style and the creative process, they spotlighted not only the picture’s main theme but its methods of representation. Furthermore, this continuous reference to the medium of expression was a direct call to the audience to engage with the subject matter and think about the actuality of the visual language and the social types being presented. Plays on words, turns of phrase, and reflections on images drawn del natural (from nature) brought the issue of reality and representation to the fore. The interplay between text and image was fundamental in creating a comical rapport with audiences that in turn intensified their awareness of an image’s subject and the aesthetic conventions the draughtsmen used and reworked. In this sense, the authors and artists of second costumbrismo created a language that was not only self-conscious but also extremely self-referential, focused on form and medium more than on the mere content. In relation to art and literature in Spain during the second

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

214

Madrid on the move

half of the nineteenth century, critics have stressed that the act of drawing attention to the formal qualities of both writing and painting indicates a turn to modernism. Self-reflectivity was also a quality of literary realism, one that reduced language to signs and symbols and, in this sense, anticipated rather than broke from the abstract representational forms of literary modernism.1 Authors and painters of the mid-1800s also showed a high level of self-awareness and concentrated on the plasticity of painting rather than on the content itself in an attempt to break from the romantic style or to display some level of social discomfort.2 By focusing on the medium of representation and using self-referential visual language, late nineteenthcentury illustrators prompted audiences to interrogate the images they presented. This move was not so much a distancing from romanticism or earlier costumbrismo but a progression towards speaking through images in the lexicon of a mass-produced culture. Self-conscious types implied a continuous analysis and assessment of one’s position in the world and were a mechanism to gauge the effects that a unified, global economy could have on a local context. These types were no longer confined to a local stage; they were emblematic of a society affected by international trends and cross-national technological processes. Illustrations of social types also dealt with the ambiguous relationship between representation and reality, between information and truth, at a time when photography had not yet become the press’s primary visual medium. While sketches of types rooted in costumbrismo presented a reductive and straightforward view of society, they also condensed such complex issues as urbanisation, globalisation, and social difference into a single image with minimal visual recourses. Writers and graphic artists questioned their own rhetorical devices and epistemic tools and discussed whether photography or sketches were more veracious. Caricaturists experimented with costumbrismo to transmit puns in a quick and brash manner. These debates about truth and representation occurred at a time when costumbrismo and photography coalesced with literary and artistic movements like naturalism and realism. Overall, what discourses in popular print culture debated in the final decades of the nineteenth century was the changing role of the sketch of types, its relationship with truth, and the degree to which it was an informative vehicle of communication. To understand how nineteenth-century audiences read these images, we must explore how they talked about truth as notions of veracity are never objective or static. Sketches of social types were not only persistent but widely popular, and their success must be read in accordance with their status as an informative vehicle. Companies like Prensa Española (publisher of Blanco y Negro and ABC) and Prensa Gráfica (publisher of Nuevo Mundo, Mundo Gráfico,



Creating hybrid surfaces 215

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

and La Esfera) changed the face of Madrid’s printing industry.3 These groundbreaking enterprises of the 1890s and early 1900s rethought the visual formula of the illustrated magazine and expanded its market and presence in popular culture. Rather than tracing a line from the illustration and sketch of types to modernist art, we might better place these images in relation to photojournalism.4 Illustrations were a conceptual antecedent to the mass-produced culture that flourished in the early twentieth century. Documentary photography was not opposed to the long-standing tradition of the street type but rather evolved out of it.5 I will examine how the new editorial ventures of the 1890s, and Blanco y Negro in particular, fused the layout and language developed in the illustrated and satirical magazines and brought them into direct dialogue with photographic methods. This process resulted in the coexistence of all three media – illustration, caricature, and photography – not only in one single issue but on one single page, thus enabling viewers to experience all three forms of expression at just one glance. Depictions of social types in the illustrated and satirical press eased this transition for the audience, from a literacy in printed images to a literacy in multiple visual formats, a phenomenon that once again calls into question the discourse of modernity (and its associated media) as an abrupt break from the past.

Very aware types: the visual–verbal dynamics of the press

Late nineteenth-century visual costumbrismo was extremely self-­conscious: sketchers and chroniclers not only concentrated on a scene’s subject matter but drew attention to the rhetorical devices they used. This trait was already perceptible in the writings of Mesonero Romanos and Mariano José de Larra in the 1830s.6 Writers of early costumbrismo debated and reflected on the genre’s aims, actuality, and methods of communication. They highlighted their reliance on precision and brevity, mechanisms of the press; and they used terms linked to image-making, such as boceto (sketch), cuadro (tableau), and fotografía (photography), to indicate that they were presenting an instance of contemporary life in visual terms.7 The significance of the social type was also debated amongst authors who criticised the way in which character types like ‘la gitana, el guerrillero, la ama de llaves, el indiano y el sereno’ (the gypsy, the guerrillero, the housekeeper, the Indian, and the watchman) were portrayed performing ordinary activities, such as eating or sleeping, rather than engaging in situations that implied something about their true character and soul.8 Although this understanding of popular types may seem to contradict our present-day notions of objectivity, these kinds of texts critiqued the

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

216

Madrid on the move

­ arrator’s lack of involvement in the scene and called for a rethinking of n the genre. Veracity was not only a matter of describing actions or physical features from an external standpoint; it involved examining the characters’ inner traits and attitudes. With the rise of literary genres such as realism and naturalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, writers concerned themselves with their status as costumbrista authors and became aware of the hybrid style that emerged in their writings. Coinciding with discussions about neologisms and the contamination of the Spanish language, especially through the press, the prologue to Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s Cosas que fueron (Things that were, 1871) reflected on form and held that language required  a certain level of freedom to effectively convey meaning. The prologue’s author, Rodríguez Correa, expressed this sentiment as ‘esa honradez con la que la forma debe seguir la idea, no como esclava sumisa ni como señora imperante, sino como hermana dulce y bondadosa compañera’ (that honesty according to which form should follow an idea, not as a submissive slave nor as a dominant lady, but as a sweet sister and giving companion).9 Thus, in order to effectively convey a message, form needed to adapt to ideas rather than to abide by rigid aesthetic and ­linguistic models. Such concerns about language and form crossed over into image-making. Due to its intercultural qualities and presence across cultural media, visual costumbrismo served as a platform to engage in these debates, not through heated exchanges but through the visual language itself. Late nineteenthcentury print culture concerned itself even more with form, in part due to the advances in reproduction techniques that allowed for a more dynamic interplay between words and sketches, especially in the satirical press. The articulation of the type and the medium of representation became the central point of the illustration. In a study on the relationship between language and image, the sociologist Dominik Bartmanski underscores the importance of ‘taking the “formal” qualities of the seen as seriously as their informational “content”’.10 Form, content, and words operated jointly in sketches of social types to convey feelings about urban life. If romantic costumbrismo was historically self-conscious, as Pla Vivas has put it,11 second costumbrismo was extremely self-referential. Moreover, these self-conscious reflections on the medium of representation as well as on one’s status in the world became more frequent in the second half of the century, as societies realised that the world was becoming connected in new ways. Authors alluded to the fact that what they described were not exact reproductions of the scenes of daily life but ‘conversaciones estereotipadas’ (stereotyped conversations).12 Some pieces were so self-referential that their authors listed different subcategories of costumbrista archetypes within a



Creating hybrid surfaces 217

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

broader description of a specific social type.13 This practice indicated the authors’ knowledge of the epistemic tools of the genre and created a rapport with readers who recognised the character types. Similarly, accompanying texts and captions not only contained specific terms meant to underline the status of these images as cuadros de costumbres (sketches of mores) but continuously referred to the condition of these characters as stereotypes. For instance, an illustration titled ‘¿En qué pensamos?’ (What are we thinking?), published in Blanco y Negro in 1893, featured a set of character types that included a waiter, a student, a coachman, a watchman, and a judge (figure 5.1). The composition underlined the psychological traits of the social types and the ways in which the reader might identify with them. From the early nineteenth century, costumbrismo commonly provided readers with a panoramic view of society, transporting them to the places described by the author.14 The well-known draughtsman and caricaturist Eduardo Sáenz Hermúa, or simply Mecachis, took this artifice one step further. Not only did he transport the reader to the places depicted, but he also brought them to the mindsets of the character types themselves. The inviting question ‘What are we thinking?’ is a word game that evokes the thoughts of the cast of social types featured on the page and, at the same time, prompts readers to reflect on their interaction with the image. The illustration breaks the socalled fourth wall, the invisible barrier that separates the characters from their audience. In this way, Mecachis invited readers to participate in this dialogue and interrogate its relation to reality and the adequacy of this taxonomy of types. Together with Ramón Cilla, the author of these sketches, Mecachis was one of the best-known caricaturists of the late 1880s and 1890s. He devoted most of his career to sketches of types and customs, contributing to Madrid Cómico and La Caricatura, which he founded in 1884, and also toying with political satire in magazines like La Broma (The Joke) and El Motín (The Mutiny). His sketches were unembellished yet expressive, and they engaged in graphic metaphors and what Manuel Barrero has termed ‘sensogramas’, schematic representations of what was perceived at a sensorial level.15 Although Mecachis reflected on the technical difficulties he encountered as an artist – such as ‘el problema tan arduo del continuo movimiento’ (the arduous problem of continuous movement), as one contemporary critic put it – his overall dexterity rested in understanding ‘la Mecánica’ (the Mechanics) of composition and especially the social dynamics he portrayed.16 Another fundamental aspect to consider is the text that appeared with the images: captions, headings, and titles. From the 1870s to the turn of the century, illustrated periodicals like La Ilustración Española y Americana, La Ilustración Nacional, and La Ilustración Artística

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document 218 Madrid on the move

5.1  Mecachis, ‘¿En qué pensamos?’, Blanco y Negro, 97 (11 March 1893), 179

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



Creating hybrid surfaces 219

5.2  Juan Comba, ‘Costumbres madrileñas. El último tranvía’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 1 (8 January 1891), 22

r­ eproduced d ­ epictions of new practices linked to urbanisation under titles like ‘Tipos y costumbres’ (Types and customs), ‘Costumbres madrileñas’ (Madrilenian customs), and ‘Costumbres modernas’ (Modern customs), referring to them as ‘nuestras costumbres contemporáneas’ (our contemporary customs).17 For instance, Juan Comba’s 1891 ‘Costumbres madrileñas. El último tranvía’ (Customs of Madrid. The last tram) depicted an array of street types near the Puerta del Sol that included a paper boy, middle-class strollers, street vendors, and idlers fending off the cold (figure  5.2). An 1876 illustration by David Perea, on the other hand, concentrated on a scene of bourgeois sociability near the fountain of the Castellana and rounded up different social types, such as fashionably dressed bourgeois women and flirtatious pollos (young cocky lads), depicted in the lower right corner of the impressive centrefold) (figure 5.3). From the 1850s, novelists, too, attempted to evoke the contemporary customs of a new bourgeoisie concerned with liberal values, urbanity, and social climbing.18 Perea’s grand centrefold commented on a crucial effect of urbanisation and economic prosperity, especially for the middle and upper classes: the importance of being seen in public space and displaying wealth, be it through carriages and coachmen or the latest styles. While the earlier

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

5.3  David Perea, ‘Costumbres madrileñas. Paseo de carruajes en la fuente de la Castellana en una tarde de primavera’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 11 (22 March 1876), 200–1



Creating hybrid surfaces 221

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

romantic costumbrismo had also engaged with contemporary issues, the influence of realism and photography, coupled with the advances in reproduction techniques, renewed and transformed some of c­ostumbrismo’s most defining features. Captions had the potential to at once update the visual narratives of costumbrismo  and  draw  attention  to  the rhetorical devices used, heightening the audience’s awareness of both the content and the medium of representation. Because late nineteenth-century Spanish journalism was such a hotchpotch of styles, headings and captions sometimes incorporated terms like tipos (types) and escenas (scenes) as signs.19 Buttressed by the presence of costumbrismo’s key features, captions and titles provided audiences with a specific context and indicated that despite the modern theme and approach, the pieces in question were contemporary cuadros de costumbres. Roland Barthes observes that images have long existed alongside words, and that words inevitably guide and ‘remote-control’ perception of images.20 Captions undeniably function as ‘signposts’, as Walter Benjamin puts it.21 They render images more accessible, and this interplay between text and image was fundamental in the development of print culture throughout the nineteenth century. That said, if we consider the visual and discursive elements that articulate a picture ‘jointly and simultaneously’, then words and images become ‘constitutive meaning-makers’.22 Furthermore, in some instances, a title came to be unnecessary, as the type itself was a clear enough signpost for audiences to identify the scene at hand. This recourse to the recognisability of type was especially prevalent in the satirical press, where multiple types sometimes occupied a small space. Thus, it was not only the caption that served as a signpost but the tipo itself. This recognisable visual nomenclature of costumbrismo proved to be just as effective as written language. As suggested by Bartmanski, we must tease out how the visual experience was perceived and discussed in order to grasp how words and images function as interdependent meaning makers.23 Writers and illustrators took special care to discuss the motifs they used and to assess the adequacy of costumbrista-inspired subject matter. Writers like Carlos Frontaura, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Eduardo Lustonó, Enrique Sepúlveda, and Roberto Robert, all of whom were frequent contributors to the press and founders of their own editorial ventures, updated the conventions of costumbrismo to adapt to the times and fit the demands of their readers. Second costumbrismo continued to serve the purpose of providing light yet astute observations on contemporary society.24 Carlos Frontaura, for instance, critiqued the tiresome and outmoded image of Spain articulated by the French, in which the country was depicted as a place ‘donde no se piensa en otra cosa que en tocar las castueñuelas, en robar los caminos, y en pelar

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

222

Madrid on the move

la pava’ (where all one thinks about is playing castanets, highway robbery, and gossiping about nothing in particular).25 Frontaura’s words are especially significant considering that he was a major proponent of second costumbrismo, the director of comic periodicals El Cascabel and La Risa, and a frequent contributor to the press. For this author and businessman, the use of codified types reflected something more than a shallow national stereotype. In his brief literary pieces, Frontaura did not dwell on outmoded types but instead put them into dialogue – whether to praise or critique – with contemporary phenomena like trams, new modes of consumerism, or an increased presence of women in public spaces.26 An 1888 review of his book Tipos madrileños (Madrilenian types, 1888), published in the newspaper La Época, described the author’s style and his reliance on repertoires of types, but what it specifically praised was the author’s skill at mastering an apparently simple genre that nonetheless gave an insightful account of social practices.27 Like Faustina Sáez de Melgar, who edited the 1881 Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas (Spanish, American, and Lusitanian women described by themselves), Frontaura condemned not the visual language of costumbrismo but rather the unsophisticated and anachronistic manner in which it was deployed. The presence of types was, therefore, justified – so long as it engaged with contemporary concerns in some way. In the 1882 edition of Cosas que fueron, a collection of Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s costumbrista articles, the author reflected on whether his work truly belonged to the genre and enquired into the meanings of the cuadro de costumbres. The piece ‘Las ferias de Madrid’ (The fairs of Madrid), which discussed the city’s markets and fairs, began by drawing attention to the genre and how it was being transformed by technologies such as photography. No creáis que es un artículo de costumbres a la manera del Curioso Parlante, lo que me propongo a escribir hoy. Ni yo tendría fuerzas para tanto, ni teniéndolas, incurriría en semejante anacronismo. Y digo esto, porque los artículos de costumbres no están ya de moda. … ¡Cómo han de estarlo (perdonadme la rudeza de la expresión), si no se estilan ya las costumbres!!! … ¡Las costumbres, que son, o que eran, el alma de la vida y la vida de toda la sociedad! Propóngame aquí únicamente sacar una especie de fotografía de las Ferias de Madrid.28 (Do not believe that what I intend to write today is a sketch of customs in the style of the Curioso Parlante. Not even I would have the strength to do such a thing, and if I did, I would not fall into such an anachronism. And I am saying this because sketches of customs are no longer in style. … How could they  be  (pardon the crudeness of the expression), if customs are no longer in  style!!! … The customs that are, that were, the soul of life and



Creating hybrid surfaces 223 the life of all society! Here all I propose is to take a sort of photograph of Madrid’s Fairs.)

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

This brief passage operates on many levels. It underscores the language of representation itself and refers to its historical conditions. The reader was drawn into the present moment by the emphasis placed on the aesthetic and its sometimes anachronistic uses versus contemporary trends and shifting tastes. At the same time, the passage brought nostalgia into the equation, and it explored the convention of a Madrid que se va (Madrid that is fading) by dwelling on the changing character of the urban landscape and referring to the costumbrista author par excellence Mesonero Romanos, who wrote under the pseudonym Curioso Parlante (Curious Chatter). And lastly, as in early costumbrismo writings with their frequent allusions to panorama, the passage alluded to photography, anticipating the role that this medium would play in the shifting of the sketch of customs from the ‘typological to the documentary mode’.29 In a similar vein, Emilia Pardo Bazán resorted to the visual aesthetic of costumbrismo to draw attention to the presence of vagrants in the capital. Appearing on the front page of La Ilustración Artística, her article, titled ‘La corte … de los Milagros, artículo crítico sobre costumbres contemporáneas de Madrid’ (The court … of Miracles, critical articles on Madrid’s contemporary customs, 1896) was a critique of the social inequalities of the Restoration and the growing presence of idlers on the streets of the capital.30 To make her point, Bazán underlined that a true cuadro de costumbres should depict mendigos (beggars) – just as Comba did in his 1891 ‘Costumbres madrileñas’ (see figure 5.2). Bazán’s article used conventions such as clichéd dialogue, stock figures, and fixed expressions like ‘con más hambre que un oso’ (hungrier than a bear). Most importantly, the author articulated her critique of mendicity through the visual language of costumbrismo, and, in doing so, underlined the gap that existed between reality, representation, and memory: Hay pobres bien educados y también los hay pintorescos, que nos ofrecen un goce artístico, pues los estamos viendo, no en carne y hueso y harapos, sino a la acuarela y al óleo. De estos mendigos con estética se ven más por los pueblos y por las ciudades antiguas, generalmente sirve de fondo a su interesante figura el muro de una catedral o el pórtico de un convento o la reja herrumbrosa de algún caserón; no obstante, también en Madrid se pueden concentrar tipos dignos del pincel de Velázquez. (There are well-educated poor people, and there are also picturesque ones, who provide us with artistic enjoyment, because we are not seeing them in flesh and blood but in watercolours and oils. These aesthetic beggars are more commonly seen in towns and old cities; generally behind their ­interesting

224

Madrid on the move

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

figure a cathedral wall or the portico of a convent or the rusty gate of a ramshackle house serves as a background. However, these types, worthy of the paintbrush of Velázquez, can also be found in Madrid.)

Although this social critique incorporates satire and a cartoonish exaggeration, it also makes recurring references to past artistic manifestations. Pardo Bazán similarly used this technique in the 1889 novel Insolación, which referred to historical artefacts and put the spotlight on visual artefacts and collective memory.31 She drew on the aesthetics of costumbrismo to comment on contemporary poverty, the sugar-coated ways in which the privileged viewed the underclasses, and the convoluted relationship between remembering, representing, and seeing.

Very aware types: satire and humour Satirical magazines also relied heavily on the identification of types. Self-referential dialogues were key to constructing the narratives of cartoons, and these illustrations exposed the visual–verbal dynamics of the press and the role that these dynamics played in viewers’ negotiation of images  and  their relation to urban life. The magazine Madrid Cómico, which enjoyed wide success in the 1880s, is generally thought to have supported the regime’s conservative values and antimodernist approach to artistic expression. However, humour has the innate ability to identify and contest social and cultural boundaries. As stated by Anu Korhonen, ‘laughter is at the same time recognition and reaction to cultural boundaries’.32 Multiple factors come together in a comic effect, which can be triggered by lampooning oneself or others, by pointing to the absurdity of established norms, or by temporarily suspending social conventions. Humour, which capitalises on ambiguity, mockery, and role reversal, is distinct from laughter, which is contagious and functions by eliciting emotional responses; however, humour and laughter operate together, and their combination endows them with ‘powerful rhetorical potential’.33 During the second half of the nineteenth century, satirical magazines were immensely popular across Europe. A combination of factors led to their success: advances in printing techniques made the production of these gazettes economically viable, cartoons were rooted in picturesque conventions already familiar to  audiences, and new themes related to urban life afforded artists with innovative thematic lines. As a result, humour became an effective commercial product and a vehicle with which to negotiate urban change in cities across Europe. Analysing what made people laugh gives insight into how they mediated transformation and what they expected of popular



Creating hybrid surfaces 225

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

culture. While humour is site-specific and dependent on a region’s political and social circumstances, satire was used as a rhetorical device across cultures and a mechanism with which to deal with change. Some themes did, however, transcend national boundaries. Among these themes were urbanisation, social class, and the global effects of industrialisation and consumption.34 As a result, public discourses reflected, again, on form and on the way in which humour could act as a medium of communication as well as a leisure outlet. Like journalists, satirists struggled to make a living, a circumstance that even led to the creation of a new character type towards the end of  the  century: the escritor cómico (comical writer), a fraught, aspiring writer trying to make his way in a competitive printing industry.35 In 1877, Jacinto Octavio Picón wrote a tentative history of caricature that spanned thousands of centuries and several European countries, commencing in antiquity and concluding with the French publication La Caricature and the work of artists like Honoré Daumier and Paul Gavarni and the Spaniard Leonardo Alenza. Picón, who exhibited cosmopolitan and progressive ideals, was a novelist, art critic, and journalist who contributed to such illustrated publications as La Ilustración Española y Americana, Los Madriles, and Madrid Cómico.36 Like Baudelaire, who described the sketch of manners as a medium capable of capturing the ephemeral present and the eternal, Picón defended the value of caricature as an expression of his times and supported its energetic character and economic yet effective delivery: ‘La caricatura es la sátira dibujada, la sustitución de la frase por la línea; es la pintura de lo defectuoso y lo deforme, que señala y castiga con el ridículo los crímenes, las injusticias y hasta las flaquezas de los hombres’ (Caricature is satire in drawing, the substitution of a sentence for a line; it is the painting of the defective and deformed, that points to and punishes crimes, ­injustices, and even mankind’s weaknesses with ridicule).37 An 1888 centre spread in Madrid Cómico, part of larger series called ‘España Cómica. Apuntes de un viaje’ (Comic Spain, Notes from a journey), illustrates how satire played on the readership’s knowledge of costumbrismo’s conventions (figure 5.4).38 This image presents over a dozen scenes portraying a range of old and new types associated with Madrilenian identity, including a working-class seamstress, a watchman, two bourgeois strollers, an aguador (water carrier), an intentionally outmoded and out-of-place maja (a type representative of Madrid’s popular classes), an underclass insolent chulo, and even a broadsheet of the patron saint of Madrid, San Isidro Labrador, pinned to the wall, alluding to the popularity of printed ephemera during this period. Gathered under a one-word heading, ‘Madrid’, this bricolage represented something of a compendium of urban types spanning several decades and lampooned some of their

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

226

Madrid on the move

5.4  Ramón Cilla, ‘Madrid’, Madrid Cómico, 287 (18 August 1888), 4–5

public ­behaviours. At the heart of the spread were the themes of anachronism, form, and social aspiration. The author of the centrefold, Ramón Cilla, was one of the foremost ­cartoonists of the Restoration and collaborated in numerous satirical papers throughout the 1880s. As noted by Manuel Barrero, he published under different pseudonyms, regardless of the publications’ ideological stance or even geographical location, and, along with other graphic artists like Josep Lluís Pellicer and Mecachis, he was instrumental in the development of the historieta in Spain, a precursor to the comic strip. Although his career is mostly linked to Madrid Cómico’s editor, Sinesio Delgado, Cilla was a truly prolific graphic artist, and between 1886 and 1900 he contributed simultaneously to fourteen different publications. In addition, he was frequently called on to participate in newly launched magazines that hoped to capitalise on his popularity.39 Cilla’s widespread publishing habits and concern with making the most of his market value were traits shared by many graphic illustrators and journalists of this period. There was even a sense of community amongst some of these professionals. In La vida en Madrid en 1887 (Life in Madrid in 1887), Enrique Sepúlveda dedicated a chapter to Madrid Cómico and recounted that Cilla, in his formative years, sometimes asked friends and colleagues to aid him in explaining his drawings through captions, as he felt that ‘no tienen ni pies ni cabeza’ (they made no sense).40 Delgado has been credited with dominating the output of the magazine,41 but these meetings and conversations at cafés among fellow professionals shaped Cilla’s drawings, as Cilla himself acknowledged.42 While we cannot speak of collective



Creating hybrid surfaces 227

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

authorship, these early professionals professed the public dimension of their drawings and their resolve to communicate in a competent and comical way. That Cilla enjoyed widespread popularity without being a prodigious artist points to the independence that illustrated print culture gained from academic art throughout the latter decades of the century. This was a period when artists saw the need to adapt from a system of patronage to one of market value, and to reconsider the value of the work of art in a world of cheap prints.43 Thus, illustrators needed to be not only decent draughtsman but also market-savvy individuals if they wanted to earn a living from their trade. Cilla would proudly emphasise decades later that he made a living as a caricaturist.44 In this sense, he was a key figure in professionalising the sector. In addition to facing criticism for his relative lack of talent, Cilla was also disparaged for being superficial and repetitive, as mentioned in an interview conducted by Blanco y Negro in 1934, during the Second Spanish Republic and just three years before his death. The interviewer began by adopting a sceptical tone towards Cilla and his shallow portrayal of the Restoration period, but, as the conversation progressed, the interviewer appeared to be won over by the caricaturist’s amusing and intimate way of not only telling stories but also observing and recounting history. In the words of the journalist, Cilla had offered him a ‘cursiosa cinta cinematográfica de toda una historia pasada y actual reproducida a través de tipos y de figuras, y de incidentes y de agitaciones y de luchas’ (curious cinematographic film of an entire past and current history reproduced by way of types and figures, and incidents and agitation and struggles).45 Cilla’s appeal rested on his work’s light yet brash combination of commentary and entertainment, components on which popular culture would later lean heavily. In his 1877 history of caricature, Picón observed that ‘la vida está sembrada de accidentes cómicos que si muchas veces son hijos de la situación y del momento, son también, con frecuencia, producto de nuestro modo de ser, y que ofrecen siempre blanco a sus tiros’ (life is plagued with comical accidents that, albeit often being an offshoot of the moment, are frequently also the product of our character and always provide an easy target).46 This idea summarised what audiences expected to find in a cartoon: a haphazard feature, like an encounter, and some element with which the readership could collectively identify in order to recognise, and consequently laugh at, the source of the mishap. For this reason, types and customs were fundamental in shaping and giving a face to urban change. But, as noted by Cilla’s interviewer and authors such as Sáez de Melgar and de Alarcón, the use of the type as an epistemic tool was justified insofar as it commented on contemporary life and did not merely rehash old images. Returning to Cilla’s centrefold, we can see that one of its most noteworthy types is the lower-class, idle stroller located to the right of the title

228

Madrid on the move

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(detail of figure 5.4). The sketch shows a scrawny man with a hunched yet insolent pose and defiant gait. His top hat and ragged jacket accentuate his shabby demeanour. In Pardo Bazán’s critique of Madrid’s contemporary customs, she briefly described the physique of an idle vagrant in terms that bear an uncanny resemblance to this cartoon: Poco antes de llegar a San Ginés, cerca de un puesto de libros de lance que hace frente a dos buenas librerías de la calle del Arenal, suele reclinarse un típico mendigo, semejante a un emigrado político ruso, o a un profeta errante, de esos que aparecen en Irlanda. Bajo su abollado sombrero de copa flotan abundantes bucles grises, que le inundan los hombros, y una barba patriarcal, gris también, irradia sobre el ancho pecho, cubierto por una levita raída y mugrienta.47 (Shortly before arriving in San Ginés, near a second-hand bookstand facing two good bookstores on Arenal Street, a typical beggar is usually lazing around, similar to a Russian political migrant, or a wandering prophet like those that appear in Ireland. Beneath his dented top hat float his abundant grey curls, falling upon his shoulders, and a patriarchal beard, also grey, ­radiates over his wide chest, covered by a ragged and filthy frock coat.)

This type was frequently depicted by Cilla and his contemporaries and shares similarities with, for example, Pellicer’s sketches of idlers congregating at the Puerta del Sol (as in figure 3.5). It ties in with the late nineteenthcentury chulo, which shifted from being a romantic and endearing archetype bound to Madrid’s underclasses to a wisecracking, street-smart rascal. The chulo was also a trademark figure across popular culture and was featured widely in zarzuelas and género chico. Cilla’s fellow caricaturist Mecachis also depicted this social type, doing so in an 1889 vignette printed in the comic paper Madrid Alegre under the unequivocal heading ‘Chulerías’ (a term related to the insolent popular type) (figure 5.5). Mecachis explicitly explored this shift in the typology and perception of chulos and majos in a panel of the illustration that was captioned ‘La chulería. Ayer. Hoy’ (La chulería. Yesterday. Today), making use of the customary then-and-now narrative. Similar to Cilla’s illustration of deliberately outdated majos, Mecachis’s portrayal of the chulo type, reminiscent of the paintings of Goya, illustrates societal transformation and reflects not only on the type itself but also on the connotations of the trope and the ways that they played out in a contemporary setting. Cilla’s 1888 image of a vagrant was accompanied by self-referential text (detail of figure 5.4). Its caption read, ‘Este tipo es desconocido en provincias ¡y no saben la ganga que tienen!’ (This type/chap is unknown in the provinces, and they don’t know how lucky they are!). A play on words

Creating hybrid surfaces 229

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



5.5  Mecachis, ‘Chulerías’ (detail), Madrid Alegre, 8 (23 November 1889), 4–5

was employed with the word tipo, which referred both to the archetype itself as well as to the man’s status as an ordinary ‘tipo’, a bloke or chap. Elías Zerolo’s 1895 dictionary specified various meanings for the term tipo and even cited Pérez Galdós to illustrate the multifaceted meanings of the term.48 Conversely, it was not until 1914 that the Real Academia recognised these additional definitions of the word, which had hitherto been limited to explaining specimens of things, typography, or zoological categories. As with the 1893 ‘En qué pensamos?’ (see figure 5.1), this wordplay broke the fourth wall and opened a dialogue with the reader, who, whether uncomfortable or indifferent, was encouraged to reflect on the veracity of the social type. In his foundational study on spatiality, Edward Soja built on the work of Lefebvre and Foucault to engineer his concept of ‘thirdspace’. His theory attempted to rebalance the relationship between spatiality, history, and sociability to create an inclusive and open concept in which ­‘everything comes together … subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdis­ ciplinary, everyday life and unending history’.49 Although Soja makes spatial experience his object of study, these qualities also come together

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

230

Madrid on the move

in ­ illustrations that, like the 1888 ‘Madrid’, drew from remembrance and presence, past history and present practices, difference and sameness, personal experience and ­collective memories. These seemingly polarised concepts ­converged in these costumbrista-inspired cartoons, and it was this convergence that, in the final analysis, made up the picture and produced a moment of comic relief. Thus, rather than enforcing these divides, costumbrismo helped bridge them. Self-referential types and plays on costumbrista-related words such as tipo and costumbre appeared in other satirical magazines like El Mundo Cómico and Madrid Alegre. An 1889 illustration by Cilla titled ‘En el restaurant’ (At the restaurant) showed character types that were customarily associated with underclass eateries (figure 5.6). The heading set the scene and f­ unctioned as

5.6  Ramón Cilla, ‘En el restaurant’, Madrid Alegre, 77 (16 November 1889), 5



Creating hybrid surfaces 231

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

a source of comic relief in that it contrasted these poorly dressed men with the new fashionable and cosmopolitan restaurants of the era. Both the venue and the term restaurant represented a novelty in Madrid. Zerolo’s 1895 dictionary identified restaurant as a Gallicism that equated to the ‘fonda castellana’ (Castilian inn). While businesses and newspapers began using the term restaurant in the mid-1800s, the Spanish (and hispanised) term restaurante was not recognised by the Real Academia until 1925.50 The caption below the image read, ‘¡Es raro! Todavía no he perdido la costumbre de comer’ (How odd! I still haven’t forgot the custom of eating). The joke here is a play on words: the Spanish word costumbre carries connotations of past customs and traditions but also denotes present habits and daily routines. A similar play on words appears in a cover illustration for an 1876 issue of El Mundo Cómico (figure 5.7). This illustration was by Domingo Muñoz, who was also a contributor of La Caricatura, Blanco y Negro, and La Ilustración Española y Americana. The image shows two drunken idlers; the man on the left appears to be looking at the sky, while the one on the right casually leans on a wall beneath a lamppost. Printed at a time when cities across Europe were experimenting with electric street lighting (Madrid inaugurated public electric lighting just two years later – an event that was recorded by La Ilustración Española y Americana), the illustration concentrated on the effects of technological advancement. The dialogue reproduced the idlers’ conversation. The first asks whether the source of light (which comes from the lamppost) radiates from the sun or the moon, and the second replies: ‘¡Hombre! … no sé decirle a V. … porque soy forastero y no conozco las costumbres de este país’ (Man! … I don’t know what to tell you. … I’m a foreigner and don’t know the customs of this country). The origins of the cuadro de costumbres (sketch of mores) have been linked to the French littérature de mœurs, which is in turn similar to the English sketch of mores. Scholars have discussed the correct translation of the term mœurs in early nineteenth-century literature and the way in which the meaning of this term shifted throughout the nineteenth century.51 What I want to highlight here is that, in the late nineteenth century, the word costumbre was associated with the enduring genre of costumbrismo, as can be inferred by Cilla’s and Muñoz’s cartoons, yet at the same time it also alluded to everyday habits and rituals that would be familiar to the audience. In just a few strokes and a short caption, these kinds of images condensed debates about social class, internationalism, and urban transformation, and, most significantly, they showed how all these issues were connected. The success of the satirical print relied on the economy of its language. The trademark aesthetic of costumbrismo and its self-referential language enabled artists and commentators to effectively communicate on such complex issues with as few elements as possible.

Madrid on the move

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

232

5.7  Domingo Muñoz, ‘Los perdidos o los borrachos’, El Mundo Cómico, 158 (30 January 1876), 1



Creating hybrid surfaces 233

Hybrid surfaces

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

In order to understand how printed images functioned, we must identify the modes of expression available to artists and commentators at the time, as well as audience perceptions of the real. It was not until the turn of the century that photographic equipment became less cumbersome and more effective at capturing rapid movement.52 Sketches, therefore, continued to be instrumental in documenting urban society and instances of daily life that photographs could not yet capture, such as the inside of a tram, the brisk boarding of an omnibus, or a quick exchange of glances. A common critique of late nineteenth-century illustrated print culture in Spain is that it was conservative and perpetuated an antimodernist style. Indeed, it was not until the early 1900s that a new era arose in the history of the illustrated press, with the perfection of photography and the introduction of innovative layouts inspired by art nouveau design. Companies like Prensa Española (publisher of Blanco y Negro and ABC) and Prensa Gráfica (publisher of Nuevo Mundo, Mundo Gráfico, and La Esfera) would change the face of Madrid’s printing industry in the early twentieth century.53 While the popularity of these new editorial models led to the decline of some of Madrid’s benchmark papers of the nineteenth century, illustrations and sketches of types were still relevant and not outmoded artistically. Their decline was due, rather, to the rise of photography, which – unlike avantgarde styles – fulfilled the same function as these sketches. Thus, as an instrument of visual communication, images of social types were conceptually linked to photojournalism. Histories of print culture tend to study engravings either in relation to artistic styles or as a vehicle of information. With the first approach, engravings are studied in relation to a chronology that goes something along the lines of costumbrismo/romanticism, naturalism, realism, and modernist art styles. The second approach, in contrast, traces a different chronological line based on the print’s agency as a vehicle of mass-­produced communication. If we follow the second line of thought, engraving offers a conceptual foundation for both the production and reception of p ­ hotographs. This approach does not imply that illustrated magazines of the turn of the century like Blanco y Negro were not informed by the modernist style but rather emphasises the informative nature and objectives of these prints. From the invention of photography in the late 1830s, cultural producers foresaw its great potential in reproducing a large number of images at low cost.54 This possibility, however, would take decades to materialise, only doing so in the 1880s and 1890s with the widespread use of photoengraving in high-end periodicals such as La Ilustración Española y Americana. However, the ties between representation, communication, and engraving

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

234

Madrid on the move

were such that early photoengravings even attempted to imitate prints by choosing similar compositions and subject matter like city views and monuments.55 Photography did not overthrow other visual media like painting or graphic illustration during the nineteenth century; rather, it enriched these media and, in turn, was enhanced by them.56 Drawings and photographs, then, shared the same space until the turn of the century and originally served similar purposes: to give an account of events, peoples, and practices in a reliable and timely manner. Because popular print culture shared similar traits across different national contexts, this symbiotic relationship between sketch and photography existed elsewhere in Europe as well. Emily Morgan has described how documentary photography of street life in London did not replace the sketches or rhetoric of the street type but ‘evolved out of it’.57 This observation sheds light on the way that illustrations and caricatures of street types became an instrumental piece in the development of twentieth-century visual and mass communication. Despite photography’s early detractors, the transition from sketches to photography in late nineteenth-century popular print culture was protracted yet fluid, and both media coexisted in the press until the consolidation of photography’s presence in newspapers well into the 1900s. Once again, the discourse of cultural modernity as a break or rupture is called into question. To understand the convergence of the two media, we must analyse public discourses that addressed the relationship between illustration and truth. Reproductions of images differed from artworks on account of their status as public images, on the one hand, and their instrumental role in transmitting information, on the other. The 1883 press laws in Spain contemplated the dual role of the print as an artwork and a public image that had the same status as the printed word in its capacity to communicate to a large audience. Moreover, histories of the press dating from the early 1900s, such as León Roch’s 75 años de periodismo (75 years of journalism, 1923) underlined the value of the reproduced image as an agent of information rather than as a unique work of art.58 Even when high-end magazines reproduced engravings of Spanish and foreign oil paintings, they were responding to the more informational objective of apprising readers of new styles and artists. For graphic illustrations of current events draughtsmen were shunned when they diverged from what was considered to be reliable information and were dismissed for taking reality into their own hands, something that rendered the informative picture invalid. Illustrated publications, from the beginning, aimed to offer a timely record of events rather than to disseminate art. This objective was not a constraint on artistic originality but rather part of a larger drive to establish the parameters of graphic journalism. As observed by Jason Hill and Vanessa Schwartz, ‘the richness of these images depends



Creating hybrid surfaces 235

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

in surprising measure on the invariably complex nature of their grip on the truth’.59 The principles according to which notions of truth and information were established were, of course, ambiguous and subjective. Furthermore, in this period veracity was linked to experience and imagination, an impossible marriage from our present point of view. For this reason, we must explore the ways in which writers and illustrators talked about and dealt with notions of truth and reality. The issue of reality and its links to representation was also central to visual and literary costumbrismo. Inherent in the style was its commitment to depicting reality and ideas of truth and historical processes. Authors and artists were aware of the inner workings of the style by the late nineteenth century, as well as the role that the genre played as a medium geared towards the public and not academic audiences. From the eighteenth century, writers had discussed the extent to which their output reflected or should reflect reality, a debate that gained momentum in Spain with the simultaneous popularisation among audiences of genre painting, which depicted local customs and was excluded from academic circles and fine arts exhibitions.60 Thus, while it was accepted in the Restoration, costumbrista painting was originally perceived not as conservative but as a step away from neoclassicism and academic painting.61 As stated by Rebecca Haidt, costumbrista writers questioned the veracity and realism of engravings from the 1830s and considered woodcut illustrations to be more real because they drew on remembrance and imagination.62 Reality and truth are, of course, ambiguous concepts, but what is clear from the debates and representations that emerged from the early 1800s was that expressing reality and social change by way of typified gestures was one of the genre’s main objectives. Though this objective may seem paradoxical, it is key to decoding the persistence and prevalence of street types in popular culture well into the twentieth century. Sketches were considered, to a certain degree, to be closer to reality due to their informative nature and commitment to contemporary concerns and everyday issues. Although illustrated print culture concentrated on common themes and stock figures, it also placed great emphasis on the realism and immediacy of its content. Captions used words that denoted veracity, such as apuntes (notes), croquis del natural (sketch from nature), estudios del natural (studies from nature), and dibujos del natural (drawings from nature). An 1877 illustration from Pellicer, for example, attempted to convey the hardships endured by Madrid’s popular classes in a depiction of a funeral procession set against a desolate landscape that was meant to echo a mother’s despair (figure 5.8). A man bearing the casket of a small child headed the procession of grieving women. The drawing was published under the heading ‘Apuntes de Madrid’ (Notes of Madrid), and a caption further

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

236

Madrid on the move

5.8  Josep Lluís Pellicer, ‘Apuntes de Madrid. ¡Pobre Madre!’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 3 (22 January 1877), 52

emphasised that it was a ‘dibujo del natural’. Both phrases underscored the value of the image as current and realistic. Such visual and literary narratives drew attention to the notion that, although the scenes depicted were anchored in some form of truth, be it historical, physical, or imaginative, they were not direct transpositions of reality. The actions of drawing in situ and seeking inspiration from photography were not incompatible in these decades. For instance, La Ilustración Española y Americana emphasised that graphic reporters like Juan Comba, who produced multiple drawings for the magazine throughout the 1870s and 1880s, drew from nature and conveyed ‘la crónica de los hechos’ (the chronicle of events).63 Furthermore, similar captions were used in photography, as, for instance, in Jean Laurent’s photographic portraits of the 1860s and 1870s, which were accompanied by captions like ‘d’après nature’ (after nature).64 The creative processes of photography and draughtsmanship were bound up with each other, and they shared a mutual reliance that further justified their informative mission. It has become a commonplace to state that the literary and artistic movement defined as realism emerged principally in France in the mid-century as a reaction to the romantic movement that preceded it, and that it remained a dominant artistic and literary style until the 1880s. As such, one of the movement’s distinctive traits was its commitment to social issues and its



Creating hybrid surfaces 237

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

effort to accurately recount contemporary life.65 However, like the news picture, the realist style also had an abstruse relationship with the elusive concept of truth. During the second half of the century, painting in Spain moved between costumbrismo and realism, with realist themes and modes of expression finding their way into costumbrista painting.66 When captions like ‘del natural’ appeared in the press, not only did they stress the veracity of the image and presence of the artist on the ground but they also alluded to the realist and naturalist movements gaining ground in European literature and the arts. That said, the expression ‘del natural’ had been in use since the eighteenth century.67 It was linked to repertoires of types well before it appeared in late nineteenth-century print culture. Used by writers such as Mesonero Romanos in the 1830s, it attests to the synchronic relationship that existed between costumbrista literature and imagery from the early century, and it confirms audience familiarity with these kinds of labels. Scholars have argued that the expression ‘d’après nature’ enforced costumbrismo’s effort to make fiction pass as reality.68 Indeed, early costumbrista writers like Mesonero Romanos stated that one of the objectives of the cuadro de costumbres was to help readers imagine they had been present during an event or witnessed a scene.69 These writers wanted to transport the viewer to the site in question (allowing for knowledge and imagination to intervene), not to make fiction pass for reality (which would imply an imposition). By the final decades of the nineteenth century, audiences were familiar with the well-worn formula and the self-referential aesthetic of costumbrismo. The satirical press even lampooned the overuse of the ‘del natural’ prompt and sardonically questioned the link between representation and reality. For instance, El Mundo Cómico dealt with this issue in ‘Croquis, por un Inocente’ (Sketch, by an Innocent) (figure 5.9). The illustration was published on 29 December 1872, one day after the Día de los Santos Inocentes, the Spanish equivalent of April Fool’s Day, and its heading alluded to the celebration and the hilarity that these childlike sketches provoked. The two figures on the left represented soldiers in ‘los tiempos modernos y la Edad Media’ (modern times and the Middle Ages), while the drawing on the right was printed above a caption reading ‘Estudios del natural. El cerdo alegre y el cerdo triste’ (Studies from nature. The happy pig and the sad pig) – the only difference between the two pigs being the position of their tails and feet. The caption’s reference to ‘del natural’ is a pun, one that relied not only on the minimal composition but on the fact that the drawing truly did represent a picture from nature (pigs, bird, and tree). The image and the pun in the caption drew attention to the specific wording used and, more than any other image we have encountered thus far in this book, to its visual mode of expression. Satirical gazettes such

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

238

Madrid on the move

5.9  Domingo Muñoz [?] ‘Cróquis [sic], por un Inocente’, El Mundo Cómico, 9 (29 December 1872), 6

as La Caricatura and Madrid Cómico addressed the polemic of drawing ‘del natural’ throughout the 1880s and, furthermore, echoed debates surrounding the naturalist movement in literature and the arts. A brief story written by Juan Pérez Zúñiga in 1880 entitled ‘Un adorno’ (An adornment) parodied artists who worked outdoors, a method of painting called en plein air that was popularised by artists of the Barbizon School and later by the Impressionists. The article lampooned the  lack of dexterity and experimental methods of Pilarcita Colorines, a female painter from a privileged background. Zúñiga critiqued her not so much because she was a woman but because painting was a mere pastime for her. Her creative process, according to Zúñiga, involved painting ‘del natural’ at the Casa de Campo, where she attempted to capture ‘algún apiñado y caprichoso grupo de árboles’ (a capricious and clustered group of trees) that on the canvas took the appearance of ‘un paquete de cigarros habanos u otra cosa por el estilo’ (a pack of Havana cigarettes or something along those lines). In the article, Zúñiga mocks not just Impressionist techniques but also history painting, as embodied in Colorines’s frustrated romance with a fellow artist described as ‘un pintor de historia, pero de historia no muy buena por cierto’ (a history painter, but not much of one for that matter).70 In a similar vein, Mecachis produced a satirical visual sequence recounting the life of an amateur artist from his childhood through his youth (figure 5.10). The double-page spread, published in La Caricatura in 1885, showed the artist dabbling disinterestedly in the required styles of the

5.10  Mecachis, ‘Un artista precoz’, La Caricatura, 45 (2 September 1885)

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

240

Madrid on the move

time, including history painting, portraiture, and landscape painting. By addressing contemporary artistic debates, these visual sequences not only showed illustrators’ apprehensions about emerging art styles but also drew readers’ attention to the question of form and invited them to interrogate the images and their link to reality. Illustrators could simplify or exaggerate the features of social types depending on the general theme of the illustration, but they needed to provide the audience with some sense of truth or a convenient overview of society in order for the presented types to ‘work’. In relation to literary costumbrismo, the critic Jorge Urrutia has argued that authors articulated representations of reality through codified models, and that because types were a summary of reality they were perceived as a more faithful representation of the truth.71 In an 1882 article on naturalism, the author Leopoldo Alas (i.e., Clarín) wrote that a novelist should be not only an observer but also a skilful constructor, able to put together a ‘slice of life’ with the potential of depicting society as a whole.72 This idea was also summed up by the author Pérez Galdós, who wrote that he built female archetypes by taking a nose from one woman, a foot from another, and eyes from a third in order to convey a convincing portrayal of women.73 Representations of omnibus and tram passengers perhaps most clearly illustrate how the use of types could summarise reality and present-day concerns. As we encountered in chapter 4, popular print culture focused on Madrid’s public transport and the social and spatial changes that it produced. Due to their ability to index multiple concerns about class and progress, making them accessible at a single glance, carriage interiors appeared in illustrated books, prints, and paintings across European cities (see figure 5.11).74 The illustration ‘Tipos y costumbres de Madrid. En el tranvía’ (Types and customs of Madrid. On the tram, 1888) by Narciso Méndez Bringa followed this common formula (figure 5.12). This illustration was the first to be reproduced in the press from Méndez Bringa, who would later produce works on Madrid’s social types and customs for La Ilustración Artística and Blanco y Negro.75 The artist’s portrayal of the inside of a coach – a perspective and setting that photographic techniques had not yet captured – did not privilege accuracy but rather encapsulated the transformations epitomised by class relations, privacy, and urban infrastructure. This focus was accentuated by the crowded tram and the compact scene, which brought together types from different social backgrounds, including a seamstress, an indiscreet man peering at a bourgeois woman, a woman with a child, an elderly couple, the tram conductor, and a bearded idler resembling the character described by Bazán in her 1896 ‘La corte … de los Milagros’. The accompanying text commented on some of these types and referenced a costumbrista article on archetypical tram passengers by Carlos Frontaura published in a previous issue.76

Creating hybrid surfaces 241

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document



5.11  George W. Joy, The Bayswater Omnibus, 1895. Oil on canvas, 172 × 120 cm

5.12  Narciso Méndez Bringa, ‘Tipos y costumbres de Madrid – En el tranvía’, La Ilustración Española y Americana, 1 (8 January 1888), 28

242

Madrid on the move

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

In 1886, two years before Méndez Bringa’s drawing was published, José F. Sanmartín y Aguirre, a poet, journalist, and zarzuela composer, compellingly critiqued social inequality in an article published in La Ilustración Ibérica. In a text stripped of idealism, he turned to social archetypes to express the structural transformation spurred by the tram, as opposed to the railway: Preciso es bendecir los beneficios del progreso, que ponen al alcance de todo el mundo comodidades reservadas antes exclusivamente a los ricos. ¿Quién no quiere permitirse el lujo de pasear en coche por tres perros chicos? El ferrocarril, con todas sus tendencias civilizadoras, no ha prestado a la causa de la democracia tantos servicios como el tranvía. En éste las clases desaparecen por completo, y el último obrero, con las manos recién tiznadas por el trabajo, se sienta al lado de la aristocrática dama, cosa que no sucede en el tren, donde las empresas, al dividir los departamentos de los viajeros, han renovado, o poco menos, la ley de castas.77 (It is accurate to bless the benefits of progress, which make commodities that once were exclusively reserved for the rich available to the poor. Who would not want to have the luxury of riding a coach for some loose change? The train, with all its civilising intentions, has not served democracy as well as the tram. It is here that classes disappear completely, and the least labourer with begrimed hands after a day’s work sits beside the aristocratic lady, something that does not happen on the train, where, by dividing passengers into compartments, companies revived, to say the least, the law of castes.)

To describe the profound effects of technology on contemporary life, the author relied on updated archetypes such as the working-class obrero (labourer). Depictions of updated types and customs, although staged and evidently unnatural, conveyed everything the tram had come to signify in a more accurate manner: not only could individuals move around more quickly but they were forced to interact in new ways and question issues of time, class, intimacy, and gender. In this sense, ‘Tipos y costumbres’ was more truthful than a photograph depicting a random moment on board a tram. Although some illustrators of the mid-1800s used photography as a source of inspiration, it was not uncommon at this time to believe that photographs simply could not capture the essence of scenes and events in the same way that illustrations did. Audiences and cultural producers did not necessarily see a conflict between subjective experience and the informative nature of the press. Indeed, conceptions of what was realistic developed in tandem with advances in documentary photography and the renewed aims of the press in the early 1900s. But, as the sketches analysed so far suggest, perceptions of objectivity depended on the tools available to the artist and informational goals of the image.



Creating hybrid surfaces 243

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Photography would ultimately take the place of illustration as the primary source of visual information. However, the documentary mode of photography evolved out of the typological depiction of street types.78 In relation to the Spanish sketch of customs, some nineteenth-century authors stressed the fluidity that existed between the sketch of customs and photography. De Alarcón, for example, specified that his contemporary cuadro de costumbres of the market fair would be realised not in the vein of Mesonero Romanos but rather in the mode of photography. Photography conveyed a more realistic albeit distant view of truth; however, writers also referred to the photographic style as a form of writing that rendered visual and literary costumbrismo more real. What was not questioned was the general overview that sketches of types provided, since neither specificity nor exceptionality was regarded as presenting a truthful view of society as a whole. This view can be appreciated in the essays gathered in Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas (1881). Although the album was an example of costumbrista writing, its editor, Faustina Sáez de Melgar, pointed to the misuses of the genre when it slipped into inaccurate and simplistic categorisations. She underscored that photography offered a more truthful portrayal of women and, therefore, that the repertoire of types featured in the volume would be ‘fotografiados’ (photographed) exclusively by female writers who were sensitive to women’s concerns and traits.79 The volume’s contributors likewise underscored their knowledge of existing types and the relationship their writings had with the medium of photography. The collection was not a photobook of street types, as this technique was still new, having only been launched in the previous decade in books such as Adolph Smith’s and John Thompson’s 1877 Street Life in London. However, the authors of Las mujeres españolas broadcasted the way in which photographic portraits had altered ideas about the sketch of types. By 1878, Spain’s foremost photographer, Jean Laurent, had completed his photographic series of provincial types as well as earlier studies of costumes and customs.80 What authors like de Alarcón and Sáez de Melgar attempted to apply to their compendiums of types and customs was a photographic attitude. They were candid in their objectives, thus showing how the visual and conceptual language of illustration, types, and customs was interwoven with that of photography. Nineteenth-century photographers struggled to define the degree of veracity of their works, since authenticity was not necessarily understood as a direct transposition of the scene, a topic that has been explored by Daniel Novak in relation to Victorian photography. In the mid-nineteenth century, there was a widespread conviction – in Spain and elsewhere – that photography did not achieve ‘pictorial truth’ and, therefore, could not

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

244

Madrid on the move

represent individuality or the essence of the scene. Consequently, photographers created what Novak has called ‘photographic fictions’ – that is, manipulations and combinations of photonegatives that were intended to convey realism or truth.81 Laurent, too, attempted to give his photographs this sense of pictorial truth by adding captions such as ‘d’après nature’. It is not my intention here to examine the evolution of sketches and photography, a subject that is well beyond this chapter. However, the accounts and images explored so far expose the profound conceptual associations linking both media. In many ways the sketch of customs functioned as a photograph, offering what Barthes called ‘having-been-there’, which he identified with the principles of photography.82 Recreating this feeling was also one of the basic premises of costumbrista articles, sketches of types, and illustrations throughout the second half of the century. The interconnections between sketches and photography, then, suggest that the rupture between the two media was not abrupt, whether in conceptual, temporal, or material terms. There was, therefore, a sense of transition rather than a rupture or break between the media and their associated mindsets. Illustrations ‘de fotografía’ were common in illustrated papers during the 1870s and 1880s, and they eased the shift to the mass-produced newspapers of the turn of the century.83 Furthermore, by the early 1860s, nearly forty photographic studios were operating in Madrid, and viewers were familiar with photography through other formats like the cartes de visites. This awareness gave way to what Bernardo Riego has called a ‘photographic consciousness’, decades before the techniques that enabled the mass reproduction of photographs in the printed press were made available.84 This conceptual and technical transition played out on the pages of the press in a visible manner, with illustrations, sketches, and photoengravings printed side by side on a single page or within the same issue. Such a layout became common in the mid-1880s and 1890s in La Ilustración Española y Americana, La Ilustración Ibérica, and La Ilustración Artística, the first magazines to experiment with the photoengraving technique; and by the early ­twentieth century, all periodicals required the presence of photographs in  order to meet the demands of a competitive market.85 Photography  gained much more  presence in the illustrated press as well as in public life in the 1890s, as evidenced in the rise of specialised ­photography magazines as well as  photography contests held for both professionals and amateurs, such as those conducted by La Ilustración Española y Americana in 1890.86 Although La Ilustración Española y Americana was a forerunner in introducing photomechanical techniques to Spain in the 1880s, the paper that truly changed the dynamics of the illustrated popular culture was



Creating hybrid surfaces 245

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Blanco y Negro, founded by Torcuato Luca de Tena in 1891. In a way, illustrated periodicals, like satirical gazettes, precipitated their own decline by introducing the mindset and technical underpinning that prepared the ground for Blanco y Negro in both style and approach. Scholars have studied the multiple factors behind Blanco y Negro’s success, from its minimal price  and size compared to those of the more lavish illustrated magazines that it eventually outshone, to its more playful and contemporary focus on daily life and the stronger presence of advertising. Its success also signalled the consolidation of a growing middle class, a rise in literacy, and the establishment of financial frameworks that allowed for the development of a profit-oriented popular culture.87 The magazine fused the tastes and interests of many types of readers, ‘giving face to the “formless agglomeration”’ that would come to typify the Spanish middle classes in the early twentieth century.88 The publication’s success owed much to the way it skilfully combined various visual traditions already present in print culture – illustration, caricature, photography, costumbrismo, and realism  – finding new ways to ‘speak to the eye’. While illustrated print culture had aimed to speak to memory, the mind, and the intellect, Blanco y Negro represented a shift towards a mass-produced popular culture, one that concentrated on entertaining the eye and selling to as many types of audiences as possible and thus relied on a visual language that merged this diverse range of print cultures. Equally important was the fact that the readership was acquainted with the conventions, layout, and ­narrative devices of the press. Rather than replacing an exhausted or outmoded vehicle of expression, Blanco y Negro (and its secondary enterprises, such as its restyled illustrations sold as postcards) confirms through its success the reach of the visual language of the illustrated and satirical press, and it exposes how close these formats were. In 1896, Blanco y Negro published a five-page report devoted to the tren botijo (jug train) (figure 5.13). Printed in the magazine’s hallmark style of the 1890s, the feature combined illustrations and cartoons – elements already common to the illustrated press and the satirical press, respectively – with photography in its treatment of this familiar and popular subject matter. In addition, its style was informed by the German magazine Fliegende Blätter and newly imported German printing presses.89 The amalgam of styles resulted in a confluence of work from many artists, with images from artists like Méndez Bringa and Díaz Huertas being brought into conversation for the first time with that of caricaturists such as Cilla and Mecachis. The publication’s opening statement and declaration of intent, published under the beguiling title ‘Vida moderna’ (Modern life), was more candid than and not as long-winded as those published by illustrated magazines in earlier decades. It briefly synthesised the publication’s goals and boldly declared

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document 246 Madrid on the move

5.13  ‘El tren botijo’, Blanco y Negro, 277 (22 August 1896)



Creating hybrid surfaces 247

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

that it strived to meet the demands of the reader insofar as doing so was commercially viable: Una crónica constante de todo lo que constituye la vida moderna. … Sin limitaciones ni trabas dentro de lo moral y lo lícito, aquí se tendrán noticias lo mismo del sarao elegante que da la fiesta popular, del acontecimiento ­literario más notable, como de la nota culminante, en fin, de última hora, sea cualquiera el motivo que la produzca. Retrato fiel de la vida moderna con sus defectos y sus bondades. … La revista culta; la gracia sin los hasta hoy inevitables ribetes pornográficos; el periódico festivo que sin temor alguno pueda abandonarse en manos de toda persona. … Es lo que se propone Blanco y Negro si el favor del público corresponde a las intenciones de la Empresa.90 A constant chronicle of everything that constitutes modern life. … Without moral or legal limitations or obstacles, here we will give news, be it on an elegant soirée or a popular fair, the most prestigious literary event or the decisive moment, in sum, the latest news, whatever the cause that has produced it. A faithful portrait of modern life with its defects and its virtues. … A cultured magazine; flair without the inevitable hitherto pornographic gestures; the festive newspaper that can be left in anyone’s hands with no fear at all. … This is what Blanco y Negro sets out to do if the audience’s support matches the intentions of the Business.

This brief paragraph candidly referred to the illustrated and comical periodicals that predated it and plainly stated its intention to combine their format, layout, and subject matter, provided that the venture proved profitable and relevant. Thus, the magazine condensed the visual forms of expression and trivial topics familiar to audiences while foregrounding photography, in a model of coexistence that is not all that different from the combination of digital photography and graphic design enabled by current technology. Blanco y Negro responded to the values of an incipient modern consumer culture: why choose one thing if you can have it all (and at a lower price)? This chapter has proposed that the images of second costumbrismo were a site where issues related to modernisation, internationalism, ­stylistic debates, and technological innovation coalesced. The persistent tropes of costumbrismo tend to be dismissed as the final remnants of the style. However, expressions of the genre appeared well into the twentieth century, and major editorial enterprises continued to rely on the style’s well-known visual language. That this reliance could simply be a matter of perpetuating a shallow repertoire of types is a viewpoint that undermines the visual literacy of both cultural producers and audiences. By the late nineteenth century, audiences were versed in several artistic traditions and a widespread visual lexicon, as the ongoing focus on form and the visual codes on display clearly

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

248

Madrid on the move

show. References to the medium of expression and the taxonomy of types were crucial elements in Madrid’s visual culture that further heightened the comical potential of an image and created a rapport between the illustrator and the audience. Ideas regarding the past, visual arts, and local identity were brought into dialogue with present-day concerns over globalism and mass culture. This confluence was achieved through plays on words, turns of phrase, and a pervasive focus on the ways in which subjects were represented. Depictions of types and customs engaged with notions of truth and reality, whether idealised or refashioned. The meanings of truth and visual representation were in the process of being redefined at a time when photography was gaining presence in mass media and a mass visual language was being shaped. Certain transformative processes, like riding the tram, could only be depicted by drawings anchored in the sketch of types. Rather than interpreting these illustrations as artistic manifestations that resisted modernist art movements, or that timidly incorporated its innovative elements, this chapter has framed them as an expression of a different nature – one that aimed to inform. The act of drawing a line from sketch journalism to photojournalism, rather than offering a reading based on artistic styles, sheds light on two issues. First, it puts to the test ideas of break and rupture that are associated with industrialisation, early instances of globalism, and the modern medium of photography. And second, it opens new lines of interpretation regarding the depiction of popular types and customs. The sketch of types operated across multiple formats, including illustration, caricature, and photography, and it had the ability to interrogate fluctuating notions of truth while simultaneously setting the conceptual foundations for twentieth-century mass culture.

Notes  1 Labanyi, Gender and Modernization, 94, 385, 388.  2 Ginger, Painting and the Turn to Cultural Modernity, 65, 132, 139.   3 Sánchez Vigil, Revistas ilustradas en España, 134. Madrid Cómico tackled its own decline and shifting models of visual consumerism in Ramón Cilla and Sinesio Delgado’s last issue, which was printed before the new director, Luis Ruiz de Velasco, took over in 1898. Ramón Cilla’s final sketches featured an ageing figure passing the torch to Blanco y Negro, Nuevo Mundo and La Revista Moderna, another example of stylistic and thematic interface between these publications. MC, 775 (25 December 1897), 420. Versteeg notes that many of Madrid Cómico’s most skilled contributors went on to work for Blanco y Negro. Versteeg, Jornaleros de la pluma, 341.



Creating hybrid surfaces 249

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

  4 Studies from this viewpoint include Riego, La construcción social de la realidad; Charnon-Deutsch, ‘From Engraving to Photo’; Juan Martínez Moro, La ilustración como categoría. Una teoría unificada sobre arte y conocimiento (Gijón: Trea, 2004), 65. As noted by Pla Vivas, Francisco Pérez Rojas argues that the persistence of a folkloric style anchored in costumbrismo hindered the adoption of the modern forms of painting that were in vogue in Europe: Pérez Rojas, Tipos y Paisajes, 1890–1930 (Valencia: Museu de Belles Arts de València, 1999), 107. It is important to clarify here that in Spanish the term modernismo can refer to a literary movement developed by Latin American writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In art, modernismo refers to the decorative style inspired by art nouveau in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and it also refers to the cultural and artistic movements that developed throughout the first third of the twentieth century in the fields of art and culture.   5 Emily Kathryn Morgan makes this argument in relation to photographic portraits of London street types in ‘True types of the London poor’, in Klich and Zanardi (eds.), in Visual Typologies, 121–34. I thank Morgan for sharing a draft of this study prior to its publication.   6 Susan Kirkpatrick, ‘The Ideology of Costumbrismo’, Ideologies and Literature, 2:7 (1978), 28.   7 María de los Ángeles Ayala, ‘El costumbrismo visto por los escritores costumbristas: definiciones’, in La elaboración del canon en la literatura española del siglo XIX: Sociedad de Literatura Española del Siglo XIX: II Coloquio (Barcelona, 20–22 de octubre de 1999) (Barcelona: Promociones y publicaciones universitarias, 2002), 53–5.  8 José María de Andueza, ‘Tipos españoles. La doncella de labor’, Semanario Pintoresco Español, 9 March 1845, 74, qtd. in Pla Vivas, La ilustración gráfica, 278. See Pla Vivas for a different reading of this text. He argues that this idea of the social type was a corruption of the costumbrista model deployed by writers to justify the utility of their creations.   9 Rodríguez Correa, prologue to Alarcón, Cosas que fueron, 26. For a discussion of this volume and Alarcón’s writings, see Enrique Rubio Cremades, ‘El peculiar costumbrismo de Pedro Antonio de Alarcón: “Cosas que fueron”’, in Isaías Lerner, Roberto Nival, and Alejandro Alonso (eds.), Actas del XIV Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas: New York, 16–21 July 2001 (New York: Juan de la Cuesta, 2001), vol. 3, 493–8. 10 Bartmanski, ‘The word/image dualism revisited’, 176. 11 Vicente Pla Vivas, ‘Manual de uso costumbrista. El proyecto de utilidad en la representación gráfica de viajeros y curiosos a mediados del siglo XIX’, Acto: Revista de pensamiento artístico contemporáneo, 2001, 41–74. 12 Juan de Madrid (pseud. of Julio Nombela), ‘Paseos de Madrid. Los jardines de Recoletos’, IEA, 1 (25 December 1869) 14. 13 See, for example, Olimpia Alborad, ‘La mujer de la Habana’, 85. 14 See, for example, Mesonero Romanos, Panorama matritense. 15 Barrero, ‘Orígenes de la historieta’, 35.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

250

Madrid on the move

16 Alejandro Larrabiera, ‘Mecachis y sus monos’, La Revista Moderna, 75 (6 August 1898). Mecachis was posthumously referred to as ‘el caricaturista español más castizo e ingenioso’ (the most castizo and witty caricaturist in Spain) but was also a distant person despite his diplomatic demeanour. See IEA, 48 (30 December 1901), 392. Despite the stylistic differences between La Revista Moderna and La Ilustración Española y Americana, they both acknowledged the value and appeal of Mecachis’s oeuvre as a testimony to its time. 17 See, for example, ‘Costumbres modernas. Jugando al dominó’, La Ilustración Nacional, 3 (30 January 1887); and Julio Nombela, ‘El tranvía’, 209. Expressions like ‘contemporary customs’ also appeared in the titles of novels by Benito Pérez Galdós and Armando Palacio Valdés from the 1870s to the 1890s. Labanyi notes that Galdós used this phrase to intentionally highlight his novels’ focus on modernity: Gender and Modernization, 4, 91. 18 On this subject see Mercer, Urbanism and Urbanity. On the petite bourgeoisie of the Castellana in Pérez Galdós’s La Desheredada, see Sieburth, Inventing High and Low, 37, 53. 19 Enrique Rubio Cremades, ‘Afinidades entre el género cuento y el cuadro de costumbres: Carlos Frontaura’, Scriptura, 16 (2001), 90. 20 Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 40. 21 Walter Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ (1936), in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 220. 22 Bartmanski, ‘The word/image dualism revisited’, 166–7. 23 Ibid., 176. 24 Rubio Cremades, ‘El peculiar costumbrismo’, 493. 25 Carlos Frontaura, Viaje cómico a la Exposición de París (Paris, 1868), 258–9, qtd. in Ana Belén Lasheras and Luis Sazatornil Ruiz, ‘París y la españolada: Casticismo y estereotipos nacionales en las exposiciones universales ­(1855–1900)’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, new ser., 35:2 (2005), 272–3. 26 See, for example, ‘Tipos madrileños: El amigo del tranvía’, IEA, 40 (30 October 1886), 243–6; ‘En el tranvía’, ByN, 5 June 1892. 27 ‘Libros nuevos’, La Época, 12,943 (20 August 1888). 28 Alarcón, ‘Las ferias de Madrid’, in Alarcón, Cosas que fueron, 55. Italics in the original. 29 Emily Morgan studies this transition in relation to street types of London in ‘True types of the London poor’. 30 Emilia Pardo Bazán, ‘La corte … de los Milagros, artículo crítico sobre costumbres contemporáneas de Madrid’, La Ilustración Artística, 754 (8 June 1896), 402. 31 Emilia Pardo Bazán, Insolación (1889; Madrid: Cátedra, 2011), 104. 32 Anu Korhonen, Fellows of Infinite Jest: The Fool in Renaissance England (Turku: University of Turku, 1999), 23–4. This observation was brought to my attention by Heidi Hakkarainen. On the subject of caricature and modernity, see her study ‘Humor, Satire und Karikatur: Das humoristische Imaginarium



Creating hybrid surfaces 251

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

der Wiener Ringstrasse’, in Harald R. Stühlinger (ed.), Vom Werden der Wiener Ringstrasse (Vienna: Metroverlag 2015), 220–43. In the context of Spanish caricature, Guijarro Alonso notes that the most effective type of caricature combines humour, reflection, and intuition: Cuidado con la pintura, 24–5. 33 Anna Foka and Jonas Liliequist, introduction to Foka and Liliequist (eds.), Laughter, Humor, and the (Un)making of Gender: Historical and Cultural Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 7. 34 On the role of humour in negotiating urban change, see, for example, Martin Baumeister and Olivier Ratouis, ‘“Rire en ville. Rire de la ville”: L’humour et le comique comme objets pour l’histoire urbaine contemporaine’, Histoire urbaine, 31 (2011), 10, 13. For a comparative study on humour, see Antonio Laguna Platero and José Reig Cruañes (eds.), El humor en la historia de la comunicación en Europa y América (Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2015). 35 Corzuelo, Del montón, 57–63. 36 Noël M. Valis notes that Picón displayed progressive, proto-feminist, and European ideals throughout his work: Jacinto Octavio Picón, novelista (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1991). 37 Jacinto Octavio Picón, Apuntes para la historia de la caricatura (Madrid: Establecimiento tipográfico, 1877), 7. 38 The series was published in the magazine between 16 October 1886 and 26 August 1888. For a study on the series, see Carlos Dardé Morales, ‘Una visión amable y humorística de España’, in La España cómica en la Colección UC de Arte Gráfico (Santander: Universidad de Cantabria, 2009), 9–19. 39 Barrero, ‘Orígenes de la historieta’, 34. 40 Sepúlveda, La vida en Madrid en 1887, 238–9. 41 Alberto Delgado Cebrián, ‘Pequeña biografía de Sinesio Delgado’, in Sinesio Delgado, Mi teatro (Madrid: SGAE, 1960), 17. 42 Manuel Fernández Núñez, ‘Cilla, dibujante de una época romántica vive con el recuerdo del pasado, y la historia de entonces es la historia de hoy’, ByN, 29 April 1934. 43 Sieburth, Inventing High and Low, 4–5, 78. 44 Fernández Núñez, ‘Cilla’, 100. 45 Ibid., 102. 46 Picón, Apuntes para la historia, 8. 47 Pardo Bazán, ‘La corte … de los Milagros’. 48 Elías Zerolo (ed.), Diccionario enciclopédico de la lengua castellana compuesto por Elías Zerolo, Miguel de Toro y Gómez, Emiliano Isaza y otros escritores españoles y americanos (Paris: Garnier, 1895), 2055. 49 Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andImagined Places (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996), 8. 50 Zerolo, Diccionario enciclopédico de la lengua castellana, 1835. Real Academia Española. Diccionario de la lengua Española, 15th ed. (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1925), 1055. In 1847, for instance, a business located on Madrid’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

252

Madrid on the move

central Calle de la Montera advertised itself as ‘Hotel, restaurant y pastelería San Luis’: El Español, 31 October 1847. 51 For a definition of the term, see Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua castellana por la Real Academia Española, 12th ed. (1884), 302. On this subject, see José Escobar, ‘Costumbrismo. Estado de la cuestión’, in Romanticismo 6. Actas del VI congreso. El costumbrismo romántico (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1996), esp. 120–5; and Beltrán Almería, ‘Algunas consideraciones sobre el concepto de costumbrismo’, 4. Beltrán Almería studies the qualitative change in the meaning of costumbre in the nineteenth century and argues that some types represented a resistance to modernity; see p. 49. 52 Bozal, La ilustración gráfica, 182–3; Charnon-Deutsch, ‘From engraving to photo’, 193. 53 Sánchez Vigil, Revistas ilustradas, 134. 54 Riego, La construcción social, 292. 55 Francesc Fontbona, ‘La ilustración gráfica. Las técnicas fotomecánicas’, in Juan Carrete et al. (eds.), El grabado en España (siglos XIX y XX), vol. 32, Summa Artis (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1988), 442. Photoengraving, the process by which a negative of a photograph was transferred onto a metal plate, allowed for a wider tonal variety when transferred to paper. For an account of the development of photomechanical processes in the Spanish press, see Charnon-Deustch, Hold That Pose, 51–70. 56 Vega, ‘Del espectáculo de la ciencia a la práctica artística cortesana’, 365. 57 Morgan, ‘True types of the London poor’. 58 Roch, 75 años de periodismo, 254. 59 Hill and Schwartz, Getting the Picture, 5. 60 Peñas Ruiz, ‘Entre literatura y pintura’, 627–8. 61 Joaquín Álvarez Barrientos, ‘En torno a las nociones de andalucismo y costumbrismo’, in Alberto Romero Ferrer and Álvarez Barrientos (eds.), Costumbrismo andaluz (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 1998), 12, qtd. in Peñas Ruiz, ‘Entre literatura y pintura’, 628. 62 Haidt, ‘Commodifying place and time’, 12, 14. 63 Martínez de Velasco, ‘Nuestros grabados’, IEA, 25 (8 July 1885), 3. 64 See, for example, Jean Laurent, Cordove, la porte d’une église (d’après nature). Photograph. ca. 1870. Biblioteca Nacional de España. 65 Linda Nochlin explores this ambiguity between reality and realism: Realism (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971). 66 On this subject, see Mireia Freixa and Carlos Reyero, Pintura y Escultura en España, 1800–1910 (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1995), 177–9; and Pérez Rojas, Tipos y paisajes, 107. 67 Valeriano Bozal, Imagen de Goya (Barcelona: Editorial Lumen, 1983), 27–42. The expression del natural appeared as a subtitle in multiple costumbrista collections during the second half of the nineteenth century. See, for example, Luis Mariano de Larra, Estudio del natural: Drama en tres actos y en verso (Madrid: Imprenta de José Rodríguez, 1863); María del Pilar Sinués de Marco, Isabel. Estudio del natural (Madrid: Imp. de los Hijos de J. A. García, 1877).



Creating hybrid surfaces 253

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

68 José Escobar, ‘Literatura de “lo que pasa entre nosotros”. La modernidad del costumbrismo’, in Berta Pallres, Pedro Peira, and Jesús Sánchez Lobato (eds.), Sin fronteras: homenaje a María Josefa Canellada (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 1994), 203–4, qtd. in Versteeg, Jornaleros de la pluma, 76–7. 69 See, for example, chapter 3, n. 27. 70 Juan Pérez Zúñiga, ‘Un adorno’, MC, 19 (9 May 1880), 5–6. Bozal argues that discussions surrounding naturalism and modern art did not emerge in Madrid’s satirical press with the same force as they did in Catalan papers: La ilustración gráfica, 197. 71 Urrutia, preliminary study for Las españolas, xxiii, xxiv. 72 Labanyi, Gender and Modernization, 8. 73 Benito Pérez Galdós, ‘Cuatro mujeres’, in Las españolas pintadas, vol. 2, 97, qtd. in Urrutia, preliminary study for Las españolas, xxiii. 74 The French artist Honoré Daumier devoted several sketches to the subject of public transport throughout the 1860s. See, for example, Honoré Daumier, The omnibus, 1864. Ink, watercolour and lithographic crayon on paper (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore). 75 Víctor Zarza, Narciso Méndez Bringa. El espectáculo de la ilustración (Madrid: Museo ABC, 2015), 115, 119. 76 Eusebio Martínez de Velasco, ‘Nuestros grabados’, IEA, 1 (8 January 1888), 6. 77 José F. Sanmartín y Aguirre, ‘Día de otoño’, La Ilustración Ibérica, 200 (30 October 1886), 694. 78 Morgan, ‘True types of the London poor’. 79 Sáez de Melgar, introduction to Las mujeres españolas, vi–vii. 80 The complete publication information for this work was: Jean Laurent, Catálogo de fotografías que se venden en casa de J. Laurent, fotógrafo de S.M la Reina y de SS.AA.RR. los Sernos (serenísimos) Infantes de España (Madrid: Depósito Carrera de San Gerónimo, 1863). Laurent’s Spanish paysans were reprinted by his photographic studio, Fototipia Laurent, in the postcard format (ca. 1900): Gran colección fotográfica de Laurent: tarjetas postales ilustradas. Serie B, Tipos españoles. 81 Daniel A. Novak, Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 4. 82 Barthes, Image Music Text, 44. 83 Jesusa Vega, Lou Charnon-Deutsch, and Margot Versteeg all note this transitional phase: Vega, ‘Modernidad y tradición en la estampa española del siglo XIX’, Anuario del Departamento de Historia y Teoría del Arte (UAM), 9–10 (1997–98), 374; Charnon-Deutsch, Hold That Pose, 47; and Versteeg, Jornaleros de la pluma, 98. On the reception of photography in cultural debates, see Bernardo Riego, Impresiones: La fotografía en la cultura del siglo XIX (Antología de textos) (Valladolid: Biblioteca de la Imagen, 2003), esp. 46–74. 84 Riego, La construcción social, 330, 186–8. Charnon-Deutsch observes that by 1863 there were thirty-nine photo studios: ‘From engraving to photo’, 179.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

254

Madrid on the move

85 Sánchez Vigil, Revistas ilustradas, 79, 138. Sánchez Vigil observes that the photoengravings appeared in 1883 and the term fotograbado encapsulated various techniques such as photochalcography, collotype, cyanotype, and photolithography. 86 Manuela Alonso Laza, La fotografía artística en la prensa ilustrada (España, 1886–1905) (PhD diss., Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2004), 14, 82–3. 87 Lou Charnon-Deutsch, ‘The creation of a mass media in nineteenth-century Spain’, Nineteenth Century Prose, 32:1 (Spring 2005), 186–226. Also see Sagrario Aznar, El arte cotidiano (Madrid: UNED, 1989), esp. 38–55. By 1896, Blanco y Negro had a run of forty-three thousand (Aznar, El arte cotidiano, 43), and by 1900 it reached sixty thousand (Charnon-Deutsch, ‘The creation of a mass media’). 88 Charnon-Deutsch, Hold That Pose, 86. 89 Sánchez Vigil, Revistas ilustradas, 87–8. 90 La redacción, ‘Vida Moderna’, ByN, 1 (10 May 1891).

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Conclusion

The history of methods is a story of losses and gains. New methods developed in order to overcome the problems and blind spots of previous ones. But something is also lost which the next theory seems to put right, and so the tale continues. —Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk

As I was concluding this book, the slogan of a well-known social media platform came to mind: ‘It’s what’s happening’. It may be considered trite or even misguided to bring up a social media slogan in a book on nineteenth-century print culture; however, if the sources reviewed throughout this book could be summed up in a single question, it may well be Is this what is happening? Illustrators, writers, and audiences continuously negotiated the meanings of novelty, interconnectedness, and representation and discussed how these concepts played out in Madrid’s cultural and visual landscape. This book began by addressing an illustration of Madrid and an 1872 article in a well-known Spanish newspaper. This brief article, ‘La verdad en su lugar’ (The truth in its place), interrogated the degree to which images, and especially illustrations reproduced in the press and geared towards a growing middle-class readership, reflected reality. One of the issues with which the author attempted to grapple was the fact that once an image was divulged in another paper, and especially a foreign one, it acquired new ramifications that were impossible to control, and so the Spanish author attempted to rewrite the story behind the image. Similar to present-day media, nineteenth-century visual culture could at once represent and contest dominant culture and also engage with controversies concerning truth and artifice, technological reproduction, and the growing availability of images.1 This was not the virtual space of information and social interaction that we inhabit today, but there was, still, a sense of a shared space of communication that allowed a periodical in Madrid to comment on, refute, and reprint an illustration that a New York newspaper had recently disseminated. Both papers, after all, spoke a similar visual language shaped over decades of printmaking. In drawing attention to the

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

256

Madrid on the move

convoluted relationship between image and information, cultural producers in Madrid encouraged audiences to think about visual representations and local identities in relation to a broader context. When I first began this book, my goals were to chart Madrid’s urbanisation and visual culture during the nineteenth century and to contribute to the long-held discussion surrounding the capital’s problematic modernity, which was long deemed peripheral, not only in relation to other countries, but also, as noted by Susan Larson, when compared to the more robust modernising processes that occurred in Barcelona.2 While it is my hope that this book has fulfilled these goals, a pressing issue caught my ­attention as I reviewed different kinds of visual materials and documents from the period – a persistent and self-aware concern with defining the multiple and changing meanings of the modern, of taste, of transformation, and of visual literacy in relation to Madrid’s landscape as well as processes occurring in other European cities. The thread that bound these issues together was a profound sense of awareness not only of what was at stake but of the visual and idiomatic devices that were available to pinpoint and describe these processes. While scholarship on Spanish art and literature had addressed this matter of self-reflection and attention to form, the main drive of this book became to further investigate the discursive practices that shaped mentalities, not so much to analyse the development of literary and artistic styles but, rather, to study what novelty and visual literacy meant to people in the nineteenth century. And so this book has concentrated on image- and meaning-making, and the ways in which artists, journalists, writers, and public figures spoke of change in their time. Speaking of change meant addressing disputes around multiple issues: urbanisation, memory and history, foreign influence and fashion, the role of local customs and stereotypes, the mechanisation of image-making, and the promise of the mass availability of culture. Cultural actors attempted to grasp these themes from the inside out rather than from the outside in. In other words, while they pondered the homogenising effects of industrialisation, they considered what foreign influence and modernity meant to Madrid and not just what modernity looked like in comparison to other industrialising countries. The overarching objective of this book, therefore, has been to analyse Madrid’s visual culture and respond to what I believe the sources under scrutiny called for: a more nuanced reading of what the modern meant and how ideas of transformation were articulated in illustrations of the capital. Considering their status as antecedents of turn-of-the-century mass media, this book has explored the visual systems of representation on which artists relied, even when at first glance they seemed to point to a narrative of modernity as one that opposed tradition to newness. Looking at images of Madrid – from sweeping vistas and maps to sketches of social types and



Conclusion 257

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

customs – we can see how diverse forms of printed media interconnected by way of their persistent concern with gauging meanings of the modern and the capital’s role in an increasingly integrated transnational system at a time when the influence of foreign models was being weighed up and negotiated. Various key concepts have run throughout this book: cross-cultural relations, interconnectedness, self-awareness, and dialogue. By dialogue I mean the ways in which preexisting visual codes and notions of tradition were brought into conversation with contemporary concerns and ideas of present-day habits. This book has attempted to demonstrate that the experience of modernisation was not mediated through strict binary divides – such as the new and the old, the past and the present, the European and the local – but instead was articulated in a more fluid manner that tested these dichotomies and articulated a middle ground that emmeshed these concepts. Polarised conceptualisations run the risk of hindering a coherent understanding of societies at the crossroads of multiple traditions and influences. Rather than solely concentrating on the traumatic experience of change or on the dominance of Northern European models of industry, public discourses focused on the viability of new fashions and schemes for Madrid, inscribing them within broader international processes of urban renewal. While Spanish modernisation may at first glance seem to have been merely emulating European fashions, people were managing something far more important here, the implications of taking part in a wide-reaching process of urbanisation, the mechanisation of culture, and the realisation that neither Madrid nor other Western cities seemed to operate alone when it came to defining novelty. The book has not focused on the ideological formations of global or national identities that may have underpinned these debates around transnational networks. It has concentrated on how social commentators came to terms with what being modern meant on this new international stage, a process that required acknowledging that definitions of things and processes were flexible, unstable, and malleable. Meanings of the modern were not only dictated by linguistic authorities and urban technocrats; they were discussed, lived, and constructed on a daily basis. This book has tackled the subject of modernity as it is conceptualised from two interrelated perspectives: the historiographical construction of the concept as centred in specific loci, such as Paris, and the idea that nineteenth-century industrialisation signified a break from previous forms of lived experience. By reassessing narratives of cultural modernity, I have used a framework that positions local and foreign elements, older aesthetic conventions, and contemporary concerns as intertwined processes. In doing so, I have also attempted to explore the concept of modernity and the phenomenological experience that it generated beyond this idea of rupture.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

258

Madrid on the move

Both textual and visual evidence have shown that modernity brought notions of the past and the present into dialogue, rather than signifying a definitive break from previous aesthetic practices and quotidian experiences. As a result of this dialogic understanding, apparently contradictory aspects of Madrid’s cultural production, such as the overlapping of the local and the cosmopolitan or the coexistence of modern vistas and costumbrismo settings, may be interpreted as integrated components of the process of modernisation. This study, therefore, has not intended to situate Madrid within the literature of modernity or to jettison the concept of modernity altogether, but instead has endeavoured to unpack the concept from its historiographical baggage and dislocate it in favour of a more fluid understanding of what being modern meant to nineteenth-century audiences. It has, therefore, acknowledged the historiography of the narrative of modernity and its methodological tools with the objective of, to a certain degree, challenging this narrative. I have followed recent scholarship that advocates for dislocating modernity and opening new pathways of investigation into so-called peripheral modernities, to which end I have proposed a methodological framework that sheds new light on ‘second-rate’ modernities and cities. This work attempts to destabilise the discourse of difference, resistance, or overlap that has characterised the history of Spanish modernity. With the objective of exploring how meanings of the modern were constructed in visual and print cultures, I began my study with an analysis of urban spectatorship and the visual culture of the illustrated press. Visual literacy evolved in tandem with the transformation of Madrid’s urban landscape, advances in the printing industry, and cross-national exchanges among editorial ventures. This period was important for the history of image-making and technologies of visual reproduction in Spain. Academics, legislators, politicians, and urban planners, as well as lesserknown journalists and graphic artists, all tackled the subject of the uses and public role of printed images. These public and cultural actors addressed the reach and ability of the mechanically reproduced image to act as a form of communication just as powerful as words. As visual and textual literacy increased among Madrid’s middle-class audiences, these cultural actors grew concerned over the adoption of neologisms and foreign practices, as well as the effect of urban renewal on the city’s layout and on deep-rooted ideas of sociability and the capital’s past history and public life. Thus, chapters 2 and 3 examined the themes of skating, the flâneur, and the high life – all of them new and foreign practices that intersected with notions of well-known activities such as the leisurely stroll. Discussions surrounding new terminologies exposed a willingness to determine whether new terms were necessary to describe contemporary practices that resembled ­preexisting ones.



Conclusion 259

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The two final chapters looked at the manner in which illustrations drew attention to the visual language and aesthetic codes being used. Conventionalised social types rooted in the long-standing tradition of costumbrismo were immensely popular in print culture and in the satirical press in particular. Old types were reworked and updated to comment on subjects like migration and female workers, as in the case of the modista and the neighbourhood fountain, while others were created by fusing costumbrista motifs with elements denoting progress, as occurred with the tram passenger and the tren botijo. In these illustrations, the visually initiated reader was probed to think about the visual devices being used and the elusive relationship between representation and truth. Considering audiences’ visual literacy and knowledge of the gestures of costumbrismo, these chapters stepped away from readings that understand social types as hackneyed, nostalgic figures hindering the adoption of modernist art and avant-garde styles. Instead, I have attempted to shed light on their popularity into the twentieth century by acknowledging their informative nature (rather than placing them in the history of artistic modernism) and their fundamental role in building the conceptual and technological foundations for the development of mass media. Like the kind of mass culture that would develop in the early twentieth century, nineteenth-century social types were easy to read, interpret, and access, and, furthermore, they had the ability to cross over to multiple media including postcards, theatrical and musical pieces, and early cinema. In addition, because of their status as printed images, costumbrista-inspired social types were part of a genre that can be traced back to the eighteenth century and that was adopted across Europe and the Americas throughout the nineteenth century. These images may have served as instruments to impose specific narratives of nation or a fledgling global awareness, but this ideological weight does not take away from the fact that audiences became versed in this kind of visual language. One effect of creating local and national stereotypes may well have been the development of a visual language that had the ability to communicate across national and cultural boundaries. A reader in Madrid would be able to recognise a British or French social type such as a street vendor thanks to the style’s trademark codes and visual cues, but they would be unlikely to be equipped to read the local idiosyncrasies of class, geographic location, or social distinctions. In charting Spain’s visual and print culture during the late nineteenth century, this book has engaged with a rich field of study into patterns of consumerism, the merging of high and low culture, and the foundations of mass media. The images examined throughout the study are representative of how the capital was depicted in the city’s illustrated press as well as in other forms of printed ephemera. Depictions of Madrid have ranged from

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

260

Madrid on the move

sprawling views, cityscapes, and maps to cartoons and scenes of everyday life and social types. Taken as a whole, they provide a valuable picture of how the city was portrayed in print culture and the fundamental role that public life played across visual media. By the final decades of the century, readers were familiar with different aesthetic conventions and managed different formats with ease. The interdependence of illustrations, cartoons, and photography reveals that drawings of street life set the conceptual foundations for twentieth-century popular culture. In sum, my hope is to draw attention to the value of these visual materials in critical discourse, as they can be read on various levels relating to art and information, or collective experience and individual mediation. The present work has explored only a small part of the thematic lines and pathways of enquiry that print culture offers to cultural critics. Having completed my work, I am convinced that there is fertile ground for further, more nuanced enquiries into how certain themes spread across various forms of popular culture in nineteenth-century Spain. The conceptual and stylistic connections among European periodicals and the way that Madrid’s urbanisation was portrayed in periodicals published outside the capital would also contribute to broadening our knowledge of modernisation in other regions of Spain. Much more remains to be said on the transnational links between printmaking and editorial projects in the nineteenth century. In this regard, in addition to adding to the literature of modernity and Madrid’s urban and visual culture, this book is situated within current scholarship dedicated to unearthing the links between editorial projects across national boundaries and the spheres of visual communication they generated. It may be the case that this book represents somewhat of an optimistic reading of the print culture and urban identity of Madrid. Indeed, it has aimed to provide a reading of the capital’s modernising process that steps away from the narratives of failure that had characterised studies of nineteenth-century Spain. My main goal, however, rests in providing an additional interpretation that I believe these sources require: one that explains the visual culture of late nineteenth-century Madrid and the notion of novelty that it entailed. It is my hope to offer another side to the complex story that was image-making, foreign influence, and urbanisation in Madrid. A study of the points of intersection among cultural texts generates as many interpretations as experience and our theoretical frameworks permit. In this sense, I have strived to bridge the gaps between the divisions that so often surface in historical study – between disciplines and methodologies, between lived experience and text, between high and low – and approach them as sites where multiple influences have intersected. Inherent in this work is a risk of creating new types of boundaries. As



Conclusion 261

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

eloquently summed up in this chapter’s epigraph, many things are gained and many others left out in our methodological experiments, but this is a risk one must take in order to advance and provide further readings of our sources and materials, of the glimpses we have of the past. This book is one further step in the path towards comprehending how urban change, the construction of meaning, and new types of images were experienced in late nineteenth-century Madrid.

Notes

1 Schwartz and Przyblyski, ‘Visual culture’s history’, 9–10. 2 Larson, Constructing and Resisting Modernity, 176.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Bibliography

Newspapers and periodicals Blanco y Negro (ByN) Daily Graphic Diario Oficial de Avisos de Madrid El Americano El Cascabel El Correo de la Moda El Día El Español El Heraldo El Imparcial El Motín El Mundo Cómico (MUC) El Mundo Pintoresco El Museo Universal El País El Panorama El Popular El Siglo Futuro El Solfeo Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper Gaceta de los Caminos de Hierro Gil Blas [Madrid] Illustrated London News La Broma La Caricatura La Caricature La Correspondencia de España La Discusión La Época La Esperanza La Flaca La Iberia La Ilustración [Madrid] La Ilustración Artística La Ilustración Católica



Bibliography 263

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

La Ilustración de Madrid La Ilustración Española y Americana (IEA) La Ilustración Ibérica La Ilustración Nacional La Moda Elegante Ilustrada La Revista Moderna La Risa L’Illustration Los Lunes de El Imparcial Los Madriles Madrid Alegre Madrid Chismoso Madrid Cómico (MC) Museo de las Familias New York Times Nuevo Mundo O Panorama Punch Revista de España Revista Contemporánea Semanario Pintoresco Español Books, chapters, and articles

Agathocleous, Tanya. Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Alarcón, Pedro Antonio de. Cosas que fueron. Cuadros de costumbres. 1871. Madrid: Imprenta y Fundición de M. Tello, 1882. Alborad, Olimpia. ‘La mujer de la Habana’. In Faustina Saéz de Melgar (ed.), Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas, 78–85. Barcelona: Establecimiento tipográfico – Editorial de Juan Pons, 1881. Aldaraca, Bridget. ‘El ángel del hogar: The cult of domesticity in nineteenth-century Spain’. In Gabriela Mora and Karen S. Van Hooft (eds.), Theory and Practice of Feminist Literary Criticism, 62–87. Ypsilanti, MI: Bilingual, 1982. Almanaque festivo para el año de 1877. Madrid: Murcia y Martí, 1876. Alonso, Cecilio. ‘Difusión de las ilustraciones en España’. In La prensa ilustrada en España: Las ilustraciones, 1850–1920, 49–54. Montpellier: IRIS, Université Paul Valéry, 1996. Alonso Laza, Manuela. La fotografía artística en la prensa ilustrada (España, 1886–1905). PhD diss., Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2004. Álvarez Barrientos, Joaquín. ‘En torno a las nociones de andalucismo y costumbrismo’. In Alberto Romero Ferrer and Joaquín Álvarez Barrientos (eds.), Costumbrismo Andaluz, 11–18. Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 1998. Álvarez Junco, José. ‘History, politics, and culture, 1875–1936’. In David T. Gies (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture, 67–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ———. ‘Rural and urban popular cultures’. In Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi (eds.), Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction, 82–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

264

Bibliography

Álvarez Junco, José, and Adrian Shubert (eds.). Spanish History since 1808. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. Amann, Elizabeth. Dandyism in the Age of Revolution: The Art of the Cut. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. ———. ‘Reading (on) the Tram: Benito Pérez Galdós’ “La novela en el tranvía”’. Orbis Litterarum, 69:3 (2014), 193–214. Amin, Ash, and Nigel Thrift. Cities. Reimagining the Urban. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Amo del Amo, María Cruz del. La familia y el trabajo femenino en España durante la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. PhD diss., Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2008. Anales de la Sociedad ginecológica española. Vols. 4–5. Madrid: Imprenta de Alejandro de Gómez Fuentenebro, 1878. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983. Anttonen, Pertti. Tradition through Modernity: Postmodernism and the NationState in Folklore Scholarship. Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 2005. Arenal, Concepción. La mujer del porvenir. Sevilla and Madrid: Perié, 1869. Ayala, María de los Ángeles. ‘El costumbrismo visto por los escritores costumbristas: definiciones’. In La elaboración del canon en la literatura española del siglo XIX: Sociedad de Literatura Española del Siglo XIX: II Coloquio, Barcelona, 20–22 de octubre de 1999, 51–8. Barcelona: Promociones y publicaciones universitarias, 2002. ———. ‘Las colecciones costumbristas en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX: Entre la nostalgia y la crítica’. Reivindicar el costumbrismo. Ínsula, 637 (January 2000), 16–18. Aymes, Jean-René, and Serge Salaün (eds.). Le métissage culturel en Espagne. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2001. Ayrault, Patricia. ‘El reportaje gráfico en La Ilustración Española y Americana y Juan Comba’. In La prensa ilustrada en España: Las ilustraciones, 1850–1920, 99–108. Montpellier: IRIS, Université Paul Valéry: 1996. Aznar, Sagrario. El arte cotidiano. Madrid: UNED, 1989. Azorín Fernández, Dolores, and Rosario Baquero Mesa. ‘Los Americanismos en el Nuevo Diccionario de la Lengua Castellana de Vicente Salvá’. In Manuel Ariza Viguera (ed.), Actas del II Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua española, vol. 1, 963–70. Sevilla: Pabellón de España, 1992. Bahamonde Magro, Ángel, and Antonio Fernández García. ‘La sociedad madrileña en el siglo XIX’. In Antonio Fernández García (ed.), Historia de Madrid, 515–47. Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 1993. Baker, Edward. ‘Cómo se escribe una historia cultural: Madrid, 1900–1936’. Arte y Ciudad – Revista de Investigación, 1 (June 2013), 19–30. ———. Madrid Cosmopolita: La Gran Vía, 1910–1936. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2009. Balducci, Temma, and Heather Belnap Jensen (eds.). Women, Femininity and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789–1914. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014. Balmaseda, Joaquina. ‘La chula madrileña’. In Faustina Saéz de Melgar (ed.), Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas, 261–75. Barcelona: Establecimiento tipográfico – Editorial de Juan Pons, 1881.



Bibliography 265

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Balzac, Honoré de. Physiologie du mariage (1829). In Fisiología del matrimonio o meditaciones de filosofía ecléctica sobre la felicidad y la desgracia conyugal, translated by Alberto Robert. Madrid: Librería de Alfonso Duran, 1867. Barhurst, Kevin C., and John Nerone, ‘Civic picturing vs. realist photojournalism: The regime of illustrated news, 1856–1901’, Design Issues, 16:1 (Spring 2000), 60, qtd. in Haidt, ‘Commodifying place and time’, 13. Barrero, Manuel. ‘Orígenes de la historieta española, 1857–1906’. Arbor, 187:2 supplement (2011), 15–42. Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977. Bartmanski, Dominik. ‘The word/image dualism revisited: Towards an iconic conception of visual culture’. Journal of Sociology, 50:2 (2014), 164–81. Baudelaire, Charles. ‘The painter of modern life’ (1863). In J. Mayne (ed. and trans.), The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. London: Phaidon Press, 1964. Baumeister, Martin, and Olivier Ratouis. ‘“Rire en ville. Rire de la ville”: L’humour et le comique comme objets pour l’histoire urbaine contemporaine’. Histoire urbaine, 31 (2011), 5–18. Belting, Hans. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Translated by Thomas Dunlap. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Beltrán Almería, Luis. ‘Algunas consideraciones sobre el concepto de costumbrismo’. In Dolores Thion Soriano-Mollá (ed.), El costumbrismo, nuevas luces, 41–50. Pau: Presses de l’Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, 2012. ———. ‘Apuntes para una teoría de la cultura popular’. In Dolores Thion SorianoMollá et al. (eds.), Tradición e interculturalidad: Las relaciones entre lo culto y lo popular (siglos XIX–XX), 61–7. Zaragoza: Institución ‘Fernando el Católico’, 2013. Benevolo, Leonardo. The European City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Benito Ruano, Eloy. ‘En principio fue el nombre’. In Eloy Benito Ruano (ed.), España: Reflexiones sobre el ser de España, 13–28. Madrid: Real Academia de Historia, 1997. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. Charles Baudelaire, a Lyric Poet in the era of High Capitalism. Translated by Harry Zohn. London: NLB, 1973. ———. ‘On some motifs in Baudelaire’. In Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, 155–200. London: Pimlico, 1999. ———. ‘The return of the flâneur’ (1929). In Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (eds.), Selected Writings, vol. 2, pt. 1, 1927–1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ (1936). In Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, 217–52. London: Pimlico, 1999. Benjamin, Walter, with Asia Lacis. ‘Nápoles’. In Adriana Mancini (ed.), Cuadros de un Pensamiento, 13–26. Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi, 1992. Berger, John. About Seeing. New York: Vintage International, 1980. Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air. The Experience of Modernity. London: Penguin, 1988.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

266

Bibliography

Bills, Mark. The Art of Satire: London in Caricature. London: Philip Wilson, 2006. Birner, Ángela. ‘Los pliegos de aleluyas’. Anthropos: Revista de documentación científica de la cultura 166/167 (May–August 1995), 117–20. Blasco, Eusebio (ed.). Madrid por dentro y por fuera, Guía de forasteros incautos. Misterios de la Corte, enredos y mentiras. Madrid: J. Peña, 1873. Blatter, Joachim. ‘Glocalization’. In Mark Bevir (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Governance, 357–9. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006. Bonet Correa, Antonio. ‘Madrid y el Canal de Isabel II’, Arbor, 673 (January 2002), 39–74. Botrel, Jean-François. ‘Estadística de la prensa madrileña de 1858 a 1909 según el Registro de Contribución Industrial’. In Manuel Tuñón de Lara, Antonio Elorza, and Manuel Pérez Ledesma (eds.), Prensa y sociedad en España (1820–1936), 25–46. Madrid: Edicusa, 1975. ———. ‘Imágenes sin fronteras: El comercio europeo de las ilustraciones’. In Borja Rodríguez Gutiérrez and Raquel Gutiérrez Sebastián (eds.), Literatura ilustrada decimonónica, 57 perspectivas, 129–44. Santander: PubliCan, 2011. ———. ‘La construcción de una nueva cultura del libro y del impreso en el siglo XIX’. In Jesús A. Martínez Martín (ed.), Orígenes culturales de la sociedad liberal (España siglo XIX), 19–36. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2003. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature. Edited and translated by Randal Johnson. New York: Colombia University Press, 1993. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Bozal, Valeriano. ‘El grabado popular en el siglo XIX’. In Juan Carrete et al. (eds.), El grabado en España (siglos XIX y XX), vol. 32, Summa Artis, 245–426. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1988. ———. Imagen de Goya. Barcelona: Editorial Lumen, 1983. ———. La ilustración gráfica del siglo XIX en España. Madrid: Comunicación, 1979. Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso, 2002. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialects of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Burdiel, Isabel. ‘Los Borbones en pelota: la pornografía política en la crisis del reinado isabelino’. In Isabel Burdiel (ed.), Los Borbones en pelota, 42–74. Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2012. ———. ‘Myths of failure, myths of success: New perspectives on nineteenth-century Spanish liberalism’. Journal of Modern History, 70:4 (December 1998), 892–912. Burguera, Mónica. ‘Introducción. El atraso y sus descontentos: entre el cambio social y el giro cultural’. In Mónica Burguera and Christopher Schmidt-Novara (eds.), Historias de España contemporánea: Cambio social y giro cultural, 9–16. Valencia: Universitat de València, 2008. Burke, Peter. Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence. London: Reaktion, 2001. Cabrera, Miguel Ángel. ‘Developments in contemporary Spanish historiography: From social history to the new cultural history’. Journal of Modern History, 77 (2005), 988–1023. Cano y Olmedilla, Juan de la Cruz. Colección de trajes de España, tanto antiguos como modernos. Madrid: Casa de M. Copin, 1777–88.



Bibliography 267

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Capellán de Miguel, Gonzalo. ‘¿Mejora la humanidad? El concepto de progreso en la España liberal’. In Manuel Suárez Cortina (ed.), La redención del pueblo: La cultura progresista en la España liberal, 41–80. Santander: Universidad de Cantabria, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2006. Carballo, Borja, Rubén Pallol, and Fernando Vicente. El Ensanche de Madrid: Historia de una capital. Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 2008. Caro Baroja, Julio (ed.). Romances de ciego. Madrid: Taurus, 1966. Carrasco Marqués, Martín. Tarjetas postales ilustradas de Madrid, 1887–1905. Madrid: Ediciones La Librería, 2013. Casteras, Susan P. ‘“Weary stitches”: Illustrations and paintings for Thomas Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” and other poems’. In Beth Harris (ed.), Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century, 13–40. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2005. Catálogo de la exposición general de bellas artes de 1878. Madrid: Tiporaf. Estereotipia Perojo, 1878. Caygill, Howard. Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience. New York: Routledge, 1998. Cayón, Francisco, Patricio Sáiz, and Francisco Llorens (eds.). Base de datos de solicitudes de patentes (España, 1878–1939). Madrid: OEPM-UAM, 2000–8. http://historico.oepm.es. Cerdà, Ildefonso. Teoría general de la urbanización y aplicación de sus principios y doctrinas a la reforma y ensanche de Barcelona. 2 vols. Madrid: Imprenta española, 1867. Cerezo, Alicia. ‘Faustina Sáez de Melgar y las mujeres “pintadas por sí mismas”: Una representación correctiva de la feminidad y una visión alternativa del costumbrismo’. Letras Femeninas, 36:2 (2010), 39–59. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Cesari, Chiara de, and Ann Rigney (eds.). Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales. Utrecht: De Gruyter, 2014. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Chamberlin, Vernon. ‘The ciego in the novels of Galdós: Costumbrismo, realism, symbolism’. Decimonónica, 3:2 (Summer 2006), 1–26. Charnon-Deutsch, Lou. ‘The creation of a mass media in nineteenth-century Spain’. Nineteenth Century Prose, 32:1 (Spring 2005), 186–226. ———. Fictions of the Feminine in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Press. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. ———. ‘From engraving to photo: Cross-cut technologies in the Spanish illustrated press’. In Susan Larson and Eva Woods (eds.), Visualizing Spanish Modernity, 178–206. Oxford: Berg, 2005. ———. Hold That Pose, Visual Culture in the Late Nineteenth-Century Spanish Periodical. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. ———. ‘What they saw: Women’s exposure to and in visual culture in nineteenthcentury Spain’. In Xon de Ros and Geraldine Hazbun (eds.), A Companion to Spanish Women’s Studies, 189–210. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis, 2011. Chartier, Roger. ‘General introduction: Print culture’. In Roger Chartier (ed.), The Cultural Uses of the Print in Early Modern Europe, 1–10. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 1989.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

268

Bibliography

Choay, François. The Modern City: Planning in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Marguerite Hugo and George R. Collins. New York: George Braziller, 1969, 7, qtd. in Fraser, Henri Lefebvre, 86. Clayson, Hollis, and André Dombrowski (eds.). Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? Essays on Art and Modernity, 1850–1900. London: Routledge, 2016. Clewell, Tammy. Introduction to Tammy Clewell (ed.), Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, 1–24. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Corradi, Fernando. Diario de las sesiones de cortes. Senado, 146 (5 July 1883). Corzuelo, Andrés (pseud. of Manuel Matoses). Del montón. Retratos de sujetos que se ven en todas partes. Madrid: Imprenta de E. Rubiños, 1887. Cosgrove, Denis, and Stephen Daniels. Introduction to Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (eds.), The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, 1–10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. ———. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Cruz, Jesús. ‘Building liberal identities in 19th century Madrid: The role of middle class material culture’. Americas, 60:3 (January 2004), 341–410. ———. The Rise of Middle-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century Spain. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. Cuvardic García, Dorde. El flâneur en las prácticas culturales, el costumbrismo y el modernismo. Paris: Editions Publibook Universitaires, 2012. ———. ‘El flâneur y la flânerie en el costumbrismo español’. Filología y Linguistíca, 1 (2009), 23–38. ———. ‘El punto de vista panorámico en la literatura europea decimonónica’. Filología y Lingüística, 32:1 (2006), 37–50. Dardé Morales, Carlos. ‘Una visión amable y humorística de España’. In La España cómica en la Colección UC de Arte Gráfico, 9–20. Santander: Universidad de Cantabria, 2009. Darrigrandi, Claudia Mariana. Cuerpos y trayectos urbanos: Santiago de Chile y Buenos Aires, 1880–1935. PhD diss., University of California, Davis, 2009. Daunton, Martin, and Bernhard Rieger (eds.). Meanings of Modernity. Britain from the Late Victorian Era to World War II. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Delgado, Luisa E., Jordana Mendelson, and Oscar Vázquez. ‘Recalcitrant modernities: Spain, cultural difference and the location of modernism’. Special issue of Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 13:2–3 (August/December 2007), 105–19. Delgado Cebrían, Alberto. ‘Pequeña biografía de Sinesio Delgado’. In Sinesio Delgado, Mi teatro, 17–23. Madrid: SGAE, 1960. Dennis, Richard. Cities in Modernity, Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009. Derrida, Jacques. Glas. Translated by John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. ———. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayarti Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. ———. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.



Bibliography 269

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Diario de sesiones de las Cortes Constituyentes, 10:234. Madrid: Imprenta de J.A. García, 1870. Diario de sesiones de Cortes. Congreso de los diputados, 88. 16 April 1883. Diccionario enciclopédico de la lengua española, con todas las voces, frases, refranes y locuciones usadas en España y las Américas Españolas. Madrid: Biblioteca ilustrada de Gaspar y Roig, 1867. Diccionario manual e ilustrado de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1927. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Ante el tiempo. Historia del arte y anacronismo de las imágenes. Translated by Antonio Oviedo. 2nd ed. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo editora, 2008. ———. Ante la imagen: Pregunta formulada a los fines de una historia del arte. Translated by Francoise Mailler. Murcia: CENDEAC, 2010. Discursos leídos ante la Real Academia Española en la pública recepción del señor Don Isidoro Fernández Flórez el día 13 de noviembre de 1898. Madrid: Est. Tip. de ‘El Libera’, 1898. Discursos leídos ante la Real Academia Española en la recepción pública de Don Eugenio Sellés el día 2 de junio de 1895. Madrid: Imp. de la ‘Revista de Navegación y Comercio’, 1895. Drayton, Richard, and David Motadel. ‘Discussion: The futures of global history’. Journal of Global History, 13:1 (2018), 1–21. D’Souza, Aruna, and Tom McDonough. Introduction to Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough (eds.), The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, 1–17. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Eisenstadt, Shmuel. Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities. New York: Brill Academic, 2003. Erll, Astrid, and Ann Rigney. Introduction to Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (eds.), Mediation, Remembering and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, 1–14. Utrecht: De Gruyter, 2009. Escobar, José. ‘Costumbrismo. Estado de la cuestión’. In Romanticismo 6. Actas del VI congreso. El costumbrismo romántico, 117–26. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1996. Estampas de ferias y mercados (siglos XVIII a XX). Valladolid: Caja España, Obra Social, 2005. Estévez de G. del Canto, Josefa. ‘La mujer filipina’. In Faustina Saéz de Melgar (ed.), Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas, 510–16. Barcelona: Establecimiento tipográfico – Editorial de Juan Pons, 1881. Featherstone, Mike, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (eds.). Global Modernities. London: Sage, 1995. Fernández de los Ríos, Ángel. ‘Anales ilustrados de la Guerra en Oriente’, Semanario Pintoresco Español, 18 (30 April 1854), 144. ———. El futuro Madrid (1868). Barcelona: José Batlló, 1975. ———. Guía de Madrid (1876). Madrid: Ediciones La Librería, 2002. Ferrer del Río, Antonio, and Juan Pérez Calvo. ‘El ciego’. In Los españoles pintados por sí mismos, vol. 2, 472–82. Madrid: I Boix, 1843–44. Flint, Kate. The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Flores, Antonio. Ayer, hoy y mañana, o La fe, el vapor y la electricidad: Cuadros sociales de 1800, 1850 y 1899. 7 vols. Madrid: Mellado, 1863.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

270

Bibliography

———. Tipos y costumbres españolas. Sevilla: Francisco Álvarez y Cia, 1877. Foka, Anna, and Jonas Liliequist. Introduction to Anna Foka and Jonas Liliequist (eds.), Laughter, Humor, and the (Un)making of Gender: Historical and Cultural Perspective. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Fontanella, Lee. Clifford en España: Un fotógrafo en la corte de Isabel II. Madrid: El Viso, 1999. ———. La imprenta y las letras en la España romántica. Bern: Peter Lang, 1982. ———. Photography in Spain in the Nineteenth Century. Dallas: Dalhunty Gallery, 1983. Fontbona, Francesc. ‘La ilustración gráfica. Las técnicas fotomecánicas’. In Juan Carrete et al. (eds.), El grabado en España (siglos XIX y XX), vol. 32, Summa Artis. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1988. Foreman-Peck, James, and Pedro Lains. ‘European economic development: The core and the southern periphery, 1870–1910’. In Sevket Pamuk and Jeffrey G.  Williamson (eds.), The Mediterranean Response to Globalization before 1950, 76–106. London: Routledge, 2000. Fraser, Benjamin. Henri Lefebvre and the Spanish Urban Experience. Plymouth: Bucknell University Press, 2011. Fraser, James C. ‘Globalization, development and ordinary cities: A review essay’. Journal of World-Systems Research, 12:1 (July 2006), 186–97. Freixa, Mireia, and Carlos Reyero. Pintura y Escultura en España, 1800–1910. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1995. Frisby, David. Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986. Frontaura, Carlos. Tipos madrileños. Cuadros de costumbres. Madrid: Fernando Fé, 1888. Frost, Daniel. Cultivating Madrid: Public Space and Middle-Class Culture in the Spanish Capital, 1833–1890. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008. ———. ‘Mesonero’s Modern Landscapes’. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 6:3 (2005), 319–34. Fuchs, Rachel. Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Fusi, Juan Pablo, and Jordi Palafox. España 1808–1996. El desafío de la modernidad. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1997. Gamborino, Miguel. Los gritos de Madrid. Madrid: Calcografía Nacional, 1809–17. Geist, Anthony L., and José B. Monleón. Introduction to Anthony L. Geist and José B. Monleón (eds.), Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America. New York: Garland, 1999. George, David R., Jr. ‘Foresight, blindness or illusion? Women and citizenship in the second series of Galdós’s Episodios nacionales’. In Susan Larson and Eva Woods (eds.), Visualizing Spanish Modernity, 46–63. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Gil, Rafael, and Tomás Romea. Guía de Madrid. Madrid: Imp. de Fortanet, 1881. Gilloch, Graeme. Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. Giné, Marta, and Solange Hibbs (eds.). Tradición y cultura. La literatura traducida en la prensa hispánica (1868–98). Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. Ginger, Andrew. Liberalismo y romanticismo. La reconstrucción del sujeto histórico. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2012.



Bibliography 271

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

———. ‘The modern moment: The dawn of cultural modernity’. In Helena Buffery et al. (eds.), Reading Iberia: History/theory/identity, 79–104. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. ———. Painting and the Turn to Cultural Modernity in Spain: The Time of Eugenio Lucas Velázquez (1850–1870). Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2007. ———. ‘Spanish modernity revisited: Revisions of the nineteenth century’. Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 13 (2007), 121–32. Gluck, Mary. ‘The flâneur and the aesthetic appropriation of urban culture in mid-19th-century Paris’. Theory Culture Society, 20:5 (2003), 53–80. Gómez Aparicio, Pedro. Historia del periodismo español. De la revolución de septiembre al desastre colonial. Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1971. Gómez Pellón, Eloy. ‘La vida cotidiana de la calle o el descubrimiento artístico de las nuevas alteridades en el siglo XIX. A propósito de la obra de Francisco  Ortego y  Vereda’. In Tipos y costumbres madrileños de F. Ortego en la Colección UC de Arte Gráfico, 9–25. Santander: Editorial Universidad de Cantabria, 2011. Goñi, José Manuel. ‘Ciencia, industria y progreso en La Ilustración Española y Americana’. In Marta Giné, Marta Palanque, and José M. Goñi (eds.), La recepción de la cultura extranjera en La Ilustración Española y Americana ­(1869–1905), 465–516. Bern: Peter Lang, 2013. González Portilla, Manuel, Josu Hernando Pérez, and Josetxo Urrutikoetxea Lizarraga. ‘Desarrollo urbano y flujos migratorios: Los desequilibrios regionales en el primer proceso modernizador español, 1860–1930’. In Luis Enrique Otero Carvajal and Rubén Pallol Trigueros (eds.), La sociedad urbana en España, 1900–1936, 70–98. Madrid: Catarata, 2017. Graham, Helen, and Jo Labanyi. ‘Culture and modernity: The case of Spain’. In Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi (eds.), Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction, 1–19. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Gretton, Tom. ‘Not the flâneur again: Reading magazines and living the metropolis around 1880’. In Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough (eds.), The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, 94–112. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Guereña, Jean-Louis. ‘Un ensayo empírico que se convierte en un proyecto razonado: Notas sobre la historiografía de la sociabilidad’. In Alberto Valín (ed.), La sociabilidad en la historia contemporánea. Reflexiones teóricas y ejercicios de análisis, 13–29. Ourense: Duen de Bux, 2001. Guijarro, Miguel (ed.). Las mujeres españolas, portuguesas y americanas. 3 vols. Madrid: Imprenta y Librería de D. Miguel Guijarro, 1872–76. Guijarro Alonso, José Luis. Cuidado con la pintura. Caricaturas del arte en tiempo de vanguardias: Madrid, 1909–1925. Madrid: Entelequia, 2012. Gutiérrez Sebastián, Raquel. ‘La literatura de almanaque’. In Dolores Thion Soriano-Mollá and Jorge Urrutia (eds.), De élites y masas: Textualizaciones, 221–36. Madrid: Devenir, 2013. ———. ‘Usos, tipos, modas y costumbres del medio siglo. El costumbrismo en La Ilustración’. Anales de literatura española, 25 (2013), 185–210. Haidt, Rebecca. ‘Commodifying place and time: Photography, memory, and media cultures around 1850’. Hispanic Issues Online Debates, 3 (Spring 2011), 10–29.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

272

Bibliography

———. ‘Flores en Babilonia: Los “gritos de Madrid” y el imaginario urbano hacia 1850’. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 10:3 (2009), 299–318. ———. ‘The wife, the maid, and the woman in the street’. In Catherine M. Jaffe and Elizabeth Franklin Lewis (eds.), Eve’s Enlightenment: Women’s Experience in Spain and Spanish America, 1726–1839, 115–27. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. ———. Women, Work and Clothing in Eighteenth-Century Spain. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2011. Hakkarainen, Heidi. ‘Humor, Satire und Karikatur: Das humoristische Imaginarium der Wiener Ringstrasse’. In Harald R. Stühlinger (ed.), Vom Werden der Wiener Ringstrasse, 220–43. Vienna: Metroverlag 2015. Halbwachs, Maurice, and Jeanne Halbwachs Alexandre. La mémoire collective. Ouvrage posthume publié par Mme  Jeanne Alexandre. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1950. Hall, Stuart. Introduction to Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (eds.), Questions of Cultural Identity, 1–12. London: Sage, 1996. ———. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage, 1997. Harney, Lucy H. ‘Controlling resistance, resisting control: The género chico and the dynamics of mass entertainment in late nineteenth-century Spain’. Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 10 (2006), 151–67. Hartzenbusch, Juan Eugenio. Periódicos de Madrid: Tabla cronológica de los incluídos en la obra premiada por la Biblioteca Nacional en el certámen público de 1873. Madrid: Imp. estereotipia y galvanoplastia de Aribau y Cia, 1876. Harvey, David. Paris, Capital of Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2003. Hatt, Michael, and Charlotte Klonk. Conclusion to Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk (eds.), Art History: A critical introduction to its methods, 241–4. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2006. Heneghan, Dorota. Fashion, Gender, and Modernity in Galdós, Pardo Bazán, and Picón. PhD diss., Yale University, 2008. Henkin, David. ‘Word on the streets: Ephemeral signage in antebellum New York’. In Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (eds.), The NineteenthCentury Visual Culture Reader, 194–205. New York: Routledge, 2004. Hernández Quero, Carlos, Rubén Pallol Trigueros, and Fernando Vicente Albarrán. ‘Metropolización y trasformación del espacio urbano y de los rasgos sociales en Madrid entre 1900 y 1936’. In Luis Enrique Otero Carvajal and Rubén Pallol Trigueros (eds.), La sociedad urbana en España, 1900–1936, 99–131. Madrid: Catarata, 2017. Hill, Jason E., and Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds.). Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848. London: Random House, 1962. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger (eds.). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Huart, Louis. Physiologie du flâneur. Paris: Aubert et Lavigne, 1841. Iarocci, Michael. ‘Romantic prose, journalism, and costumbrismo’. In David T. Gies (ed.), The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, 381–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.



Bibliography 273

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Jaffe, Catherine Marie, and Elizabeth Franklin Lewis (eds.). Eve’s Enlightenment: Women’s Experience in Spain and Spanish America, 1726–1839. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2009. Jagoe, Catherine. Ambiguous Angels: Gender in the Novels of Galdós. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Jay, Martin, and Sumathi Ramaswamy (eds.). Empires of Vision. A Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Jenks, Chris. ‘Watching your step: The history and practice of the flâneur’. In Chris Jenks (ed.), Visual Culture, 142–60. New York: Routledge, 1995. Jiménez Morell, Inmaculada. La prensa femenina en España (desde sus orígenes a 1868). Madrid: Ed. De La Torre, 1992. Juergensmeyer, Mark. Thinking Globally: A Global Studies Reader. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Juliá, Santos. ‘Anomalía, dolor y fracaso de España’. Claves de Razón Práctica, 66 (October 1996), 10–21. ———. Historia de las dos Españas. Madrid: Taurus, 2004. Kirkpatrick, Susan. ‘The Ideology of Costumbrismo’. Ideologies and Literature, 2:7 (1978), 28–44. Korhonen, Anu. Fellows of Infinite Jest: The Fool in Renaissance England. Turku: University of Turku, 1999. Kurtz, Gerardo F., and Isabel Ortega. 150 años de fotografía en la Biblioteca Nacional. Guía – inventario de los fondos fotográficos. Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1989. Labanyi, Jo. Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel. Oxford: Oxford Hispanic Studies, 2000. ———. ‘Negotiating modernity through the past: Costume films in the early Franco period’. Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 13:2–3 (2007), 241–58. Lacroix, Auguste de. ‘Le flâneur’. In Les français peints par eux-mêmes, vol. 4. Paris: L. Curmer, Éditeur, 1841. Laguna Platero, Antonio, and José Reig Cruañes (eds.). El humor en la historia de la comunicación en Europa y América. Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2015. Larra, Luis Mariano de. Estudio del natural: Drama en tres actos y en verso. Madrid: Imprenta de José Rodríguez, 1863. Larson, Susan. Constructing and Resisting Modernity: Madrid 1900–1936. Madrid: La Casa de la Riqueza, 2011. ———. ‘Stages of modernity: The uneasy symbiosis of the género chico and early cinema in Madrid’. In Susan Larson and Eva Woods (eds.), Visualizing Spanish Modernity, 263–82. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Larson, Susan, and Eva Woods (eds.). Visualizing Spanish Modernity. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Lasheras, Ana Belén, and Luis Sazatornil Ruiz. ‘París y la españolada: Casticismo y estereotipos nacionales en las exposiciones universales (1855–1900)’. Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, new ser., 35:2 (2005), 265–90. Laurent, Jean. Catálogo de fotografías que se venden en casa de J. Laurent, fotógrafo de S.M la Reina y de SS.AA.RR. los Sernos (serenísimos) Infantes de España. Madrid: Depósito Carrera de San Gerónimo, 1863. ———. Cordove, la porte d’une église (d’après nature). Photograph. ca. 1870. Biblioteca Nacional de España.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

274

Bibliography

Lauster, Martina. Sketches of the Nineteenth Century: European Journalism and its ‘Physiologies’, 1830–50. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Lawless, Geraldine. ‘How to tell time’. In Andrew Ginger and Geraldine Lawless (eds.), Spain in the Nineteenth Century: New Essays on Experiences of Culture and Society, 63–88. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. ———. Modernity’s Metonyms: Figuring Time in Nineteenth-Century Spanish Stories. Plymouth: Bucknell University Press, 2011. ———. ‘The problem of the future and nineteenth-century Spain’. Hispanic Research Journal, 16:2 (April 2015), 147–62. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space (1974). Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. ———. ‘Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean cities’. In Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (eds. and trans.), Writings on Cities, 228–39. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Levy Bensusan, Samuel. Home Life in Spain. New York: MacMillan, 1910. López Ruiz, José María. La vida alegre. Historia de las revistas humorísticas, festivas y satíricas publicadas en la villa y corte de Madrid. Madrid: Compañía literaria, 1995. Loughran, Kevin, Gary Alan Fine, and Marcus Anthony Hunter. ‘Urban spaces, city cultures, and collective memories’. In Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen (eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies, 193–204. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. Lumière, Louis. La Sortie des usines Lumière. France, 1895, 1 min. Mainardi, Patricia. Another World: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Print Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. ———. ‘The invention of comics’. Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 6:1 (Spring 2007). Manrique, Jorge. Coplas por la muerte de su padre. N.p., 1476. Márquez, Miguel B. ‘Abelardo de Carlos y La Ilustración Española y Americana’. Ámbitos 13–14 (2005), 185–209. ———. ‘Juan Comba y García, cronista gráfico de “La Restauración”’. Ámbitos, 15 (2006), 365–404. Martí-López, Elisa. Borrowed Words: Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Novel in Spain. London: Associated University Press, 2000. Martínez Martín, Jesús A. ‘La cultura en el siglo XIX’. In Antonio Fernández García, Historia de Madrid, 547–61. Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 1993. ———. ‘Madrid, 1900. La configuración de una industria cultural’. Arbor, 666 (June 2001), 557–72. ———. Vivir de la pluma. La profesionalización del escritor, 1836–1936. Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2009. Martínez Moro, Juan. La ilustración como categoría. Una teoría unificada sobre arte y conocimiento. Gijón: Trea, 2004. Martínez-Pinzón, Felipe, and Kari Soriano Salkjelsvik (eds.). Revisitar el costumbrismo. Cosmopolitanismo, pedagogías y modernización en Iberoamérica. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016. Massey, Doreen. For Space. New York: Sage, 2005. Mateos, Ana. ‘Domesticando el imperio: Género y raza en Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas (1881–1882)’. Hispanic Review, 85:4 (2017), 467–88.



Bibliography 275

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Matoses, Manuel. ‘El inspector de escaparates’. El Mundo Cómico 157 (23 January 1876), 2–6. May, Jon, and Nigel Thrift (eds.). Timespace: Geographies of Temporality. London: Verso, 2001. Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. 4 vols. London: Charles Griffin, 1861. Mayne, Judith. Cinema and Spectatorship. London: Routledge, 1993. Maza Zorrilla, Elena. ‘Nuevas formas y espacios de sociabilidad al filo del siglo XX’. In Guadalupe Gómez-Ferrer Morant and Raquel Sánchez García (eds.), Modernizar España: Proyectos de reforma y apertura internacional (­ 1898–1914), 119–42. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2007. Mendoza de Vives, María. ‘La Dida (La nodriza)’. In Faustina Saéz de Melgar (ed.), Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas, 86–94. Barcelona: Establecimiento tipográfico – Editorial de Juan Pons, 1881. Mercer, Leigh. Urbanism and Urbanity: The Spanish Bourgeois Novel and Contemporary Customs (1845–1925). Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013. Mesonero Romanos, Ramón de. ‘El nuevo Madrid (Despedida) (1876)’. In Germán Rueda (ed.), Cuadros de Costumbres. Tipos, caracteres, grupos y bocetos por el Curioso parlante, 334–6. Madrid: Homolegens, 2010. ———. Escenas matritenses por el curioso parlante. Vol 2. Madrid: Imprenta de Yenes, 1842. ———. Manual de Madrid. Descripción de la Corte y de la Villa. Madrid: Imprenta de M. de Burgos, 1833. ———. Manual histórico-topográfico, administrativo y artístico de Madrid. Madrid: Imprenta de D. Antonio Yerres, 1844. ———. Nuevo manual histórico-topográfico-estadístico, y descripción de Madrid. Madrid: Imprenta de la Viuda de Antonio Yenes, 1854. ———. Obras jocosas y satíricas, Panorama matritense. 3 vols. Madrid: Oficinas de la Ilustración Española y Americana, 1881. ———. Panorama matritense (Primera serie de las escenas) 1832 a 1935. Madrid: Oficinas de la Ilustración Española y Americana, 1881. Milne, Esther. Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence. New York: Routledge, 2010. Miralles, Xavier Andreu. El descubrimiento de España: Mito romántico e identidad nacional. Barcelona: Taurus, 2016. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Molina, Álvaro. Mujeres y hombres en la España ilustrada: Identidad, género y visualidad. Madrid: Cátedra, 2013. Moral Ruiz, Carmen del. ‘Ocio y esparcimiento en Madrid hacia 1900’. Arbor, 666 (June 2001), 495–518. Morales, José Pilar. Guía del plano de Madrid y sus contornos en 1880. 5th ed. Madrid: Imp. De Nicolás González, 1880. Morgan, Emily Kathryn. ‘True types of the London poor’. In Laura Klich and Tara Zanardi (eds.). Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Contexts and Global Practices, 121–34. New York: Routledge, 2018. Moriuchi, Mey-Yen. Mexican Costumbrismo: Race, Society, and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Art. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

276

Bibliography

Munn, Nancy M. ‘The “becoming-past” of places, spacetime and memory in ­nineteenth-century, pre-Civil War New York’. Suomen Antropologi 29 (2004), 2–19. Navascués, Pedro. Arquitectura y arquitectos madrileños del siglo XIX. Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Madrileños, 1973. ———. ‘Madrid, ciudad y arquitectura (1808–1898)’. In Antonio Fernández García (ed.), Historia de Madrid, 399–437. Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 1994. Nead, Lynda. Victorian Babylon. People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Nochlin Linda, Realism. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971. Nombela, Julio. ‘El tranvía’. In Eugenio Blasco, Madrid por dentro y por fuera. Guía de forasteros incautos. Madrid: Administración, 1873. Nora, Pierre. ‘Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire’ (1989). Translated by Marc Roudebush. In Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (eds.), The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, 235–7. New York: Routledge, 2004. Norden, Gilbert. ‘“Passing fashions but no sustainable market”: A history of rollerskating in Austria before 1914’. International Journal of the History of Sport, 16:3 (1999), 72–93. Novak, Daniel A. Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Núñez de Guzmán, Hernán. Refranes o proverbios en romance, que nvevamente colligió y glossó el Comendador Hernán Nuñez, Professor eminetissimo de Rhetorica y Griego, en Salamanca. Van puesto por la orden del ABC. Salamanca: En casa de Iuan de Canoua, 1555. Nussbaum, Felicity A. Introduction to Felicity A. Nussbaum (ed.), The Global Eighteenth Century, 1–18. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Ochoa, Eugenio de. Madrid, París y Londres. Paris: Baudry, 1861. Ogle, Vanessa. The Global Transformation of Time, 1870–1950. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Oleza Simó, Joan, et al. ‘Donde se demuestra que la investigación es cosa de locos. Clarín y su paraíso sin manzanas’. In Líneas actuales de investigación literaria: Estudios de literatura hispánica, 31–62. Valencia: Universitat de València, 2004. O’Rourke, Kevin H., and Jeffrey G. Williamson. Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Ortega, Marie-Linda. ‘Imaginar la lectura versus leer las imágenes’. Ayer, 58 (2005), 87–111. ——— (ed.). Ojos que ven, ojos que leen: Textos e imágenes en la España isabelina. Madrid: Visor, 2004. ———. ‘Ortego, dessine-moi les Espagnols’. In Images et hispanité, Les Cahiers du GRIMH, 327–46. Lyon: Université Lumière-Lyon, 1998. Osgood, Frances Sargent Locke. The Cries of New York. New York: John Doggett, 1846. Ossorio y Bernard, Manuel. Ensayo de un catálogo de periodistas españoles del siglo XIX. Madrid: Imprenta y Litografía de J. Palacios, 1903. ———. Viaje Crítico alrededor de la Puerta del Sol. Madrid: Imprenta de los Señores Rojas, 1874.



Bibliography 277

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Otero Carvajal, Luis Enrique, and Rubén Pallol Trigueros. La sociedad urbana en España, 1900–1936. Madrid: Catarata, 2017. ———. ‘Tradición y modernidad en la España urbana de la Restauración’. In Guadalupe Gómez-Ferrer Morant and Raquel Sánchez García (eds.), Modernizar España: Proyectos de reforma y apertura internacional (1898–1914). Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2007. Pacheco, Francisco de Asís. ‘La legislación sobre la prensa. El proyecto de Ley de Policía de Imprenta’. Revista General de Legislación y Jurisprudencia 62. Madrid: Imprenta de la revista de legislación, 1883. Palacio Valdés, Armando. La Espuma. Novela de costumbres contemporáneas. Barcelona: Imprenta de Henrich y Compañía, 1890. Palenque, Marta. ‘Citas, versiones y traducciones en el álbum poético’. In Marta Giné, Marta Palanque, and José M. Goñi (eds.), La recepción de la cultura ­extranjera en La Ilustración Española y Americana (1869–1905), 89–112. Bern: Peter Lang, 2013. ———. ‘“El tren expreso” en cromos y postales o la gloria de Ramón de Campoamor’. In Borja Rodríguez and Raquel Gutiérrez Sebastián (eds.), Literatura ilustrada decimonónica. 57 perspectivas, 543–83. Santander: ICEL, 2011. ———. ‘Entre periodismo y literatura: Indefinición genérica y modelos de escritura entre 1875 y 1900’. In Luis F. Díaz Larios and Enrique Miralles (eds.), Del romanticismo al realismo: actas del I Coloquio de la Sociedad de Literatura Española del Siglo XIX, 195–205. Barcelona, Universitat, 1998. ———. ‘La Ilustración Española y Americana, una ventana abierta a la cultura dominante en España entre 1869 y 1905’. In Marta Giné, Marta Palanque, and José M. Goñi (eds.), La recepción de la cultura extranjera en La Ilustración Española y Americana (1869–1905), 11–18. Bern: Peter Lang, 2013. Pardo Bazán, Emilia. El viaje de novios. Madrid: Imprenta de Manuel G. Hernández, 1881. ———. En tranvía. Madrid: Administración, 1901. ———. Insolación (1889). Madrid: Cátedra, 2011. ———. ‘La mujer española’ (1890). In La mujer española y otros escritos, 324–7. Madrid: Cátedra, 1999. Parsons, Deborah. A Cultural History of Madrid. Modernism and the Urban Spectacle. Oxford: Berg, 2003. ———. ‘Fiesta culture in Madrid posters, 1934–1955’. In Jo Labanyi (ed.), Constructing Identity in Twentieth-Century Spain, 178–205. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ———. ‘Paris is not Rome, or Madrid: Locating the city of modernity’. Critical Quarterly, 44:2 (July 2002), 17–29. Partzsch, Henriette. ‘How to be a cultural entrepreneur’. In Andrew Ginger and Geraldine Lawless (eds.), Spain in the Nineteenth Century: New Essays on Experiences of Culture and Society, 191–215. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. ———. ‘“Venid, elegantes”: Seducción, información y control en las crónicas de modas españolas durantes los años 1860’. In Yvette Bürki and Henriette Partzsch (eds.), Redes de comunicación: Estudios sobre la prensa en el mundo ­hispanohablante, 281–304. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2016. Peñas Ruiz, Ana. ‘Entre literatura y pintura: Poética pictórica del artículo de costumbres’. In Borja Rodríguez Gutiérrez and Raquel Gutiérrez Sebastián

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

278

Bibliography

(eds.), Literatura ilustrada decimonónica, 57 perspectivas, 625–37. Santander: PubliCan, 2011. ———. ‘Revisión del costumbrismo hispánico: Una historia cultural transacional’. In Felipe Martínez-Pinzón and Kari Soriano Salkjelsvik (eds.), Revisitar el costumbrismo: Cosmopolitanismo, pedagogías y modernización en Iberomérica, 31–52. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016. Pérez-Bustamente Mourier, Ana Sofía. ‘Cultura popular, cultura intelectual y casticismo’. In Ana Sofía Pérez-Bustamente Mourier and Alberto Romero Ferrer (eds.), Casticismo y literatura, 125–63. Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz, Servicio de Publicaciones, 1992. Pérez Escrich, Enrique. La guerra santa: Zarzuela de grande espectáculo en tres cuadros letra de los señores Enrique Pérez Escrich y Luis Mariano de Larra; música de Emilio Arrieta. Madrid: Hijos de A. Gullón Imp. de José Rodríguez, 1879. Pérez Galdós, Benito. Fortunata y Jacinta (Dos historia de casadas). Madrid: Imprenta de la Guirnalda, 1887. ———. La de Bringas (1884). Madrid: Peraldo, Paéz y Compañía, 1906. ———. La desheredada. Madrid: Imprenta de La Guirnalda, 1881. ———. ‘La novela en el tranvía’ (1871). In Obras Completas, vol. 6. Madrid: Aguilar, 1951. ———. Lo prohibido (1884–85). Vol. 1. Madrid: Peraldo, Páez y compañía, 1906. Pérez Rojas, Francisco. Tipos y Paisajes, 1890–1930. Valencia: Museu de Belles Arts de València, 1999. Pick, Daniel. ‘Stories of the Eye’. In Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, 186–99. London: Routledge, 1997. Picón, Jacinto Octavio. Apuntes para la historia de la caricatura. Madrid: Establecimiento tipográfico, 1877. Pinto Crespo, Virgilio. ‘Madrid en 1898: Ciudad, vida cultural e instituciones culturales’. In Actas del XIII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas. Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 2000. Pla Vivas, Vicente. La ilustración gráfica del siglo XIX: Funciones y disfunciones. Valencia: Universitat de València, 2010. ———. ‘Manual de uso costumbrista. El proyecto de utilidad en la representación gráfica de viajeros y curiosos a mediados del siglo XIX’. Acto: Revista de pensamiento artístico contemporáneo, 2001, 41–74. Polizzi, Assunta. ‘El humorismo en el discurso periodístico: La “Crónica general” (1884–1904) de José Fernández Bremón’. In Marta Giné, Marta Palanque, and José M. Goñi (eds.), La recepción de la cultura extranjera en La Ilustración Española y Americana (1869–1905), 51–63. Bern: Peter Lang, 2013. Pottage, Alain. ‘The measure of land’. Modern Law Review 57:3 (May 1994), 361–84. Rabaté, Colette. ‘El epistolario de Fernán Caballero: la escritura como estrategia vital’. In Pura Fernández and Marie-Linda Ortega (eds.), La mujer de letras o la letraherida: Discursos y representaciones sobre la mujer escritora en el siglo XIX (Madrid: CSIC, 2008), 289–308. Ramos Carrión, Miguel, and Carlos Coello. De Madrid a Biarritz (viaje económico en tren de ida y vuelta). Zarzuela cómica en dos actos y cuatro cuadros. Madrid: Imprenta de José Rodríguez, 1870. Ramos Carrión, Miguel, and Mariano Pina Domínguez. Los Madriles: Pasatiempo cómico lírico en dos actos y diez cuadros original de los señores Ramos Carrión



Bibliography 279

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

y Pina Domínguez; con música de varios maestros. Madrid: Imprenta de José Rodríguez. 1877. Real Academia Española. Diccionario de la lengua castellana, en que se explica el verdadero sentido de las voces, su naturaleza y calidad, con las frases o modos de hablar, los proverbios o refranes, y otras cosas convenientes al uso de la lengua. Vol 2. Madrid: Imprenta de Francisco del Hierro, 1729. ———. Diccionario de la lengua castellana compuesto por la Real Academia Española, reducido a un tomo para su más fácil uso. 4th ed. Madrid: Viuda de Ibarra, 1830. ———. Diccionario de la lengua castellana por la Real Academia Española. 10th ed. Madrid: Imprenta Nacional, 1852. ———. Diccionario de la lengua castellana por la Real Academia Española. 12th ed. Madrid: Imprenta de D. Gregorio Hernando, 1884. ———. Diccionario de la lengua castellana por la Real Academia Española, 13th ed. Madrid: Imprenta de los Sres. Hernando y compañía, 1899. ———. Diccionario de la lengua española, 15th ed. Madrid: Calpe, 1925. Reglamento de policía urbana para la M. H. villa de Madrid, aprobado por el Excmo. Ayuntamiento Constitucional de la misma. Madrid: Imprenta de Cruz González, 1841. Rejlander, Oscar Gustav. ‘What photography can do in art’. In G. Wharton Simpson (ed.), The Yearbook of Photography and Photographic News Almanac. London: Office of Photographic News, 1867. Revista General de Estadística, 15–16 (May–June 1863). Reyero, Carlos. ‘Más allá de Francia. Las ilustraciones de pintura contemporánea extranjera’. In Marta Giné, Marta Palanque and José M. Goñi (eds.), La recepción de la cultura extranjera en La Ilustración Española y Americana ­(1869–1905), 239–68. Bern: Peter Lang, 2013. ———. Observadores. Estudiosos, aficionados y turistas dentro del cuadro. Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Servei de Publicacions, 2008. Reynolds, Nedra. Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Riego, Bernardo. Impresiones: La fotografía en la cultura del siglo XIX (Antología de textos). Valladolid: Biblioteca de la Imagen, 2003. ———. La construcción social de la realidad a través del grabado informativo en la España del siglo XIX. Santander: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Cantabria, 2001. ———. ‘Visibilidades diferenciadas: usos sociales de las imágenes en la España Isabelina’. In Marie-Linda Ortega (ed.), Ojos que ven, ojos que leen: Textos e imágenes en la España isabelina, 57–76. Madrid: Visor, 2004. Rigney, Ann. ‘Cultural memory studies: Mediation, narrative, and the aesthetic’. In Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen (eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies, 65–76. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2015. Ringrose, David. ‘Madrid, capital imperial (1561–1833)’. In Santos Juliá, David Ringrose, and Cristina Segura (eds.), Madrid. Historia de una capital, 123–251. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. 1995. ———. Spain, Europe, and the ‘Spanish Miracle’, 1700–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Rivelles y Helip, José. Colección de Trages de España. Madrid: Calcografía Nacional, 1825.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

280

Bibliography

Robert, Roberto (ed.). Las españolas pintadas por los españoles. Colección de estudios acerca de los aspectos, estados, costumbres y cualidades generales de nuestras contemporáneas. 2 vols. Madrid: Imprenta a cargo de J. E. Morete, 1871–72. Robinson, Jennifer. Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. London: Routledge, 2006. Robinson, William I. ‘Theories of Globalization’. In George Ritzer (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Globalization, 125–43. London: Blackwell, 2007. Roch, León (pseud. of Francisco Pérez Mateos). 75 años de periodismo con motivo de las bodas de diamante de “La Época”. Madrid: Ramona Velasco, 1923. Rodríguez, Antonio. Colección General de los Trages que en la actualidad se usan en España. Principiado en el año 1801. Madrid: Librería de Castillo, 1801. Rodríguez Correa, Ramón. Prologue to Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Cosas que fueron. Cuadros de costumbres, 2nd ed. (1871; Madrid: Imprenta y Fundición de M. Tello, 1882), 7–28. Rodríguez Galindo, Vanesa. ‘A patchwork of effects: Notions of walking, sociability, and the flâneur in late nineteenth-century Madrid’. In Richard Wrigley (ed.), The Flâneur Abroad: Historical and International Perspectives, 142–65. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2014. ———. ‘De paseo: Tracing women’s steps in Madrid’s late nineteenth-century illustrated press’. In Temma Balducci and Heather Belnam Graham (eds.), Women, Femininity and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789–1914, 167–87. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014. ———. ‘On and off the tram: Contemporary types and customs in Madrid’s illustrated and satirical press (1874–1898)’. In Lynda Klich and Tara Zanardi (eds.), Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Contexts and Global Practices. New York: Routledge, 2018. ———. ‘Una moda fugaz: El patinaje en la cultura impresa de Madrid a finales del siglo XIX’. In Luis Sazatornil and Antonio Urquízar (eds.), Arte, ciudad y culturas nobiliarias en España (siglos XIV–XIX). Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2019. ———. ‘Visuality and practices of looking in nineteenth-century Madrid: Representations of the old and modern city in the illustrated press’. In Robert Beck, Ulrike Krampl, and Emmanuelle Retaillaud-Bajac (eds.), Les cinq sens de la ville du Moyen Âge à nos jours. Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 2013. Rodríguez Gutiérrez, Borja. ‘Las estampas literarias decimonónicas. Élites y masas: Popularización, contaminación, apropiación y desprecio’. In Dolores Thion Soriano-Mollá and Jorge Urrutia (eds.), De élites y masas: Textualizaciones, 237–53. Madrid: Devenir, 2013. Rogan, Bjarne. ‘An entangled object: The picture postcard as souvenir and collectible, exchange and ritual communication’. Cultural Analysis, 4 (2005), 1–27. Rogers, Gayle. Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Romero Tobar, Leonardo. Prologue to Dolores Thion Soriano-Mollá (ed.), El costumbrismo, nuevas luces, 15–19. Pau: Presses de l’Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, 2013. Ros, Xon de, and Geraldin Hazbun. Introduction to Xon de Ros and Geraldine Hazbun (eds.), A Companion to Spanish Women’s Studies. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis, 2011.



Bibliography 281

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Roudometof, Victor. Glocalization: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 2016. Rubio Cremades, Enrique. ‘Afinidades entre el género cuento y el cuadro de costumbres: Carlos Frontaura’. Scriptura, 16 (2001), 89–101. ———. ‘El peculiar costumbrismo de Pedro Antonio de Alarcón: “Cosas que fueron”’. In Isaías Lerner, Roberto Nival, and Alejandro Alonso (eds.), Actas del XIV Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas: New York, 16–21 July 2001, vol. 3, 493–8. New York: Juan de la Cuesta, 2004. Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice. London: Smith, Elder, 1853. Sáez de Melgar, Faustina (ed.). Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas. Barcelona: Establecimiento tipográfico – Editorial de Juan Pons, 1881. Sáiz, Patricio. Base de datos de solicitudes de privilegios. España 1826–1876. Madrid: OPEM-UAM, 2000. http://historico.opem.es. Salvá, Eugenio (ed.). Nuevo diccionario de la lengua castellana. La última edición íntegra, muy rectificada y mejorada del publicado por la Academia Española y unas veinte y seis mil voces, acepciones, frases y locuciones, entre ellas muchas americanas añadidas por Eugenio Salvá. Paris: Librería de Don Vicente Salvá, 1846. Sánchez de Juan, Joan-Anton. ‘La “destrucción creadora”: El lenguaje de la reforma urbana en tres ciudades de la Europa mediterránea a finales del siglo XIX (Marsella, Nápoles y Barcelona)’. Scripta Nova. Revista Electrónica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales, 63 (1 May 2000). Sánchez García, Raquel. ‘Morfología del texto y producción de sentido en la lectura’. Ayer, 58 (2005), 57–86. Sánchez Vigil, Juan Miguel. Revistas ilustradas en España: Del Romanticismo a la guerra civil. Gijón: Trea, D. L., 2008. Sazatornil Ruiz, Luis. ‘Las ciudades de la memoria y el moderno espectador: De las exposiciones universales al touriste’. In José Manuel Iglesias Gil (ed.), Cursos sobre el Patrimonio Histórico, vol. 8, 49–67. Santander: Universidad de Cantabria, 2004. Schwartz, Vanessa R., and Jeannene M. Przyblyski. ‘Visual culture’s history: Twenty-first century interdisciplinarity and its nineteenth-century objects’. In Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene Przyblyski (eds.), The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader. New York, Routledge, 2004. ——— (eds.). The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. Sepúlveda, Enrique. La vida en Madrid en 1887. 3rd ed. Madrid: Establecimiento tipográfico de Ricardo Fé, 1888. ———. La vida en Madrid en 1888. Madrid: Establecimiento tipográfico de Ricardo Fe, 1889. Sepúlveda, Ricardo. ‘La romería de San Isidro. Antaño y Ogaño’. In Madrid viejo: Crónicas, avisos, costumbres, leyendas y descripciones de la villa y corte, 323–34. Madrid: Librería de Fernando Fé, 1888. Serres, Michel. Genesis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Serres, Michel, and Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture and Time. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Sheriff, Mary D. Introduction to Mary D. Sheriff (ed.), Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art, 1492–1930, 1–16. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

282

Bibliography

Shesgreen, Sean. Images of the Outcast: The Urban Poor in the Cries of London. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Shubert, Adrian, and José Alvarez Junco. Introduction to Adrian Shubert and José Álvarez Junco (eds.), The History of Modern Spain: Chronologies, Themes, Individuals. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Sieburth, Stephanie. Inventing High and Low: Literature, Mass Culture, and Uneven Modernity in Spain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. Siegel, Elizabeth (ed.). Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Simmel, George. ‘The metropolis and mental life’ (1903). In David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (eds.), Simmel on Culture, 174–86. London: Sage, 1997. Sinués de Marco, María del Pilar. El ángel del hogar: Obra moral y recreativa dedicada a la mujer. Madrid: Imprenta Nieto y C.ª, 1859. ———. Isabel. Estudio del natural. Madrid: Imp. de los Hijos de J. A. García, 1877. ———. Un libro para las damas: Estudios acerca de la educación de la mujer. Madrid: A. de Carlos e Hijo editores, 1875. Smith, Adolphe, and John Thomson. Street Life in London. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1877–78. Soja, Edward. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996. Soria, Carlos. ‘La ley española de Policía de Imprenta de 1883’. In Documentación de las ciencias de la información, vol. 6, 11–40. Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1982. Soria López, Mar. In Her Place: Geographies of Urban Female Labor in Spanish Culture (1880–1931). PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010. ———. ‘Modern castiza landscapes: Working women in Zarzuela’. Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 88:6 (2011), 821–38. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘Review. Glas-Piece: A Compte Rendu’. Diacritics, 7:3 (Autumn 1977), 22–43. Stein, Jeremy. ‘Reflections on time, time-space compression and technology in the nineteenth century’. In Jon May and Nigel Thrift (eds.), Timespace. Geographies of Temporality. London: Verso. 2001. Stierle, Karlheinz. La Capitale des signes. Paris et son discours. Translated by Marianne Rocher-Jacquin. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’homme, 2001. Suárez, Victorino (ed.). Los españoles de ogaño, colección de tipos de costumbres dibujados a pluma por los señores … y otros. 2 vols. Madrid: Librería de Victoriano Suárez, 1872. Suárez Cortina, Manuel. ‘La Restauración (1875–1900) y el fin del imperio colonial. Un balance historiográfico’. In Manuel Suárez Cortina (ed.), La Restauración, entre el liberalismo y la democracia, 31–108. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1997. ——— (ed.). La Restauración, entre el liberalismo y la democracia. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1997. Sundt, Catherine. ‘Resisting and reimagining: Flores, ayguals, and 19th-century technological innovation’. Hipertexto, 18 (Summer 2013), 66–76. Taine, Hippolyte. ‘Notes on England’ (1872). In Rick Allen (ed.), The Moving Pageant: A Literary Sourcebook on London Street-Life, 1700–1914. New York: Routledge, 1998.



Bibliography 283

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Tesoro de las tres lenguas francesa, italiana y española. Geneva: Philippe Albert and Alexandre Pernet, 1609. Thion Soriano-Mollá, Dolores (ed.). El costumbrismo, nuevas luces. Pau: Presses de l’Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, 2013. Thion Soriano-Mollá, Dolores, Luis Beltrán Almería, Solange Hibbs-Lissorgues, and Marisa Sotelo Vázquez (eds.). Tradición e interculturalidad: Las relaciones entre lo culto y lo popular (siglos XIX–XX). Zaragoza: Institución ‘Fernando el Católico’, 2013. Thion Soriano-Mollá, Dolores, and Jorge Urrutia Gómez (eds.). De élites y masas. Textualizaciones. Granada: Devenir, 2013. Thrift, Nigel. ‘“Not a straight line but a curve”, or Cities are not mirrors of modernity’. In David Bell and Azzedine Haddour (eds.), City Visions, 233–63. Harlow: Longman, 2000. Torrecilla, Jesús. El tiempo y los márgenes: Europa como utopía y como amenaza  en la literatura española. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Tres siglos de cartografía madrileña, 1622–1929: Exposición celebrada en el Salón de Columnas del centro Mesonero Romanos (Casa de la Panadería, Plaza Mayor de Madrid) del 1 al 10 de noviembre de 1997. Madrid: El Consultor de los Ayuntamientos, 1997. Tsuchiya, Akiko. ‘Talk, small and not so small: The power of gossip in Clarín’s La Regenta’. Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 31:3 (Spring 2007), 391–412. Uría, Jorge. ‘Cultura popular y actividades recreativas: La Restauración’. In Jorge Uría (ed.), La cultura popular en la España contemporánea. Doce estudios, 77–107. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2003. ———. La España liberal (1868–1917). Cultura y vida cotidiana. Madrid: Síntesis, 2008. Urrutia, Jorge. Preliminary study for Las españolas pintadas por los españoles … ­contemporáneas (1871). Edited by Roberto Robert. Madrid: Fundación Francisco Largo Caballero, 2008. Valis, Noël. The Culture of Cursilería: Bad Taste, Kitsch and Middle Class in Modern Spain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. ———. Jacinto Octavio Picón, novelista. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1991. Valverde, Emilio. Plano y guía del viajero en Madrid. Guía práctico Valverde ilustrado con profusión de grabados. Madrid: Est. tip. de los sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1884. Vega, Jesusa. ‘De la estampa a la fotografía: El traje regional y el simulacro de España’. In Carmen Ortiz García, Cristina Sánchez-Carretero, and Antonio Cea Gutiérrez (eds.), Maneras de mirar: Lecturas antropológicas de la fotografía, 61–82. Madrid: CSIC, 2005. ———. ‘Del espectáculo de la ciencia a la práctica artística cortesana: Apuntes sobre la fortuna de la fotografía en España’. Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares, 68:2 (2013), 359–83. ———. ‘Modernidad y tradición en la estampa española del siglo XIX’. Anuario  del  Departamento de Historia y Teoría del Arte (UAM), 9–10 ­(1997–98), 367–78. Versteeg, Margot. De fusiladores y morcilleros: El discurso cómico del género chico (1870–1910). Amsterdam: Rodopi Portada Hispánica, 2000.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

284

Bibliography

———. Jornaleros de la pluma: La (re)definición del papel del escritor-periodista en la revista Madrid Cómico. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2011. Viera de Miguel, Manuel. ‘El Catálogo de los ausentes: Pintura española y prestigio nacional en la Exposición del Centenario de los Estados Unidos de América de 1876’. In III Seminario de Investigación y Transferencia Los lugares del arte: Generando identidades, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 13–14 November 2013. ———. ‘Estereotipos nacionales e imágenes de poder en la Exposición Universal de Barcelona de 1888: “Honra y orgullo de la patria española”’. Anales de historia del arte, 23:1 suppl. (June 2013), 19–35. Vorms, Charlotte. Bâtisseurs de banlieue à Madrid. Le quartier de la Prosperidad (1860–1936). Paris: Créaphis, 2012. Wertsch, James V. Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Wilson, Janelle L. Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2005. Winford, Donald. An Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Winter-Froemel, Esme. ‘Unpleasant, unnecessary, unintelligible? Cognitive and communicative criteria for evaluating borrowings and alternative strategies’. In Roswitha Fischer and Hanna Pulaczewska (eds.), Anglicisms in Europe, 16–41. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. Wrigley, Richard (ed.). The Flâneur Abroad: Historical and International Perspectives. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014. Ximénez Cros, Pascual. ‘La que va a todas partes’. In Las españolas pintadas por los españoles. 2 vols. Madrid: Imprenta a cargo de J. E. Morete, 1871–72. Zabala, Cleto. La patinadora: Polka característica para piano. Madrid: Pablo Martín, 1877. Zanardi, Tara. Framing Majismo Art and Royal Identity in Eighteenth-Century Spain. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016. Zarza, Víctor. Narciso Méndez Bringa. El espectáculo de la ilustración. Madrid: Museo ABC, 2015. Zerolo, Elías (ed.). Diccionario enciclopédico de la lengua castellana compuesto por Elías Zerolo, Miguel de Toro y Gómez, Emiliano Isaza y otros escritores españoles y americanos. 2 vols. Paris: Garnier, 1895. Zervigón, Andrés Mario. ‘Rotogravure and the modern aesthetic of news reporting’. In Jason Hill and Vanessa Schwartz (eds.), Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News, 197–205. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Abad de Martí, Emilia, 182 ABC, 214 advertisements, 26, 29, 182, 184, 184 aesthetics, 3–4, 5, 10, 14–19, 28, 207n47, 259 aguadores, 178, 192, 193, 194, 199–200, 225 Alarcón, Pedro Antonio de, 216, 221–3, 228, 243 Alas, Leopoldo (Clarín), 208n72, 240 Alcázar, Manuel, 57 aleluyas, 153, 154, 155 Alenza, Leonardo, 30, 30, 33–4, 225 Alfonso XII, 38, 47, 54, 57 Almacén de los Alemanes, 94 Almanaque Cómico, 182 Almanaque festivo para el año de 1877, 184 Almudena Cathedral, 59 Álvarez Junco, José, 203–4n3 Álvarez Mendizábal, Juan, 114 Amadeo I, 188 Amann, Elizabeth, 161–2n84 ángel del hogar, 205n23 Anglicisms, 13 apuntes, 235 Aranjuez, Spain, 27, 54–5, 56, 57–8 archetypes see social types artículos de costumbres, 29–30 El Artista, 36 auques, 153 avant-garde, 4, 19

awareness, 4, 12, 14 see also self-referentiality Baker, Edward, 9, 22n21, 155 Baker, William, 181 Balzac, Honoré de, 29, 129, 133–4, 158n19 Barcelona, 64, 109, 256 Barnhurst, Kevin G., 35 Barrero, Manuel, 153, 217, 226 Barrio de Pozas, 137 Barrio de Salamanca, 137, 145, 174 Barthes, Roland, 221, 244 Bartmanski, Dominik, 216, 221 Baudelaire, Charles, 10, 57–8, 79, 129, 130, 132, 137, 225 Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo, 46 Bécquer, Valeriano, 106 beggar (mendigo), 31 Benavente, Jacinto, 140, 159–60n56 Benjamin, Walter, 6–7, 10, 79, 129, 130, 140–1, 221 Berger, John, 163 Berman, Marshall, 22n24, 187 Blanco y Negro, 16, 50, 75n97, 103, 138, 173, 182, 183, 197–200, 200, 210n92–3, 214–15, 217, 218, 227, 231, 233, 240, 245–7, 246, 249n3 Blatter, Joachim, 13 the blind man (el ciego), figure of, 29–30, 30

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

286

Index

Böhl de Faber, Cecilia, 83 see also Caballero, Fernán (Cecilia Böhl de Faber) Bonaparte, José, 114 Bonet, Antonio, 194 books, 14, 16, 27, 28, 29 Botrel, Jean-François, 70n20 Boym, Svetlana, 188 Bozal, Valeriano, 168–9 broadsheets, 16, 26 La Broma, 217 Bruno, Giuliana, 66 buildings, 27 see also specific buildings Burdiel, Isabel, 8 Burke, Peter, 105, 212–13 Bustillo, Eduardo, 201–2 Caballero, Fermín, 118–19 Caballero, Fernán (Cecilia Böhl de Faber), 83, 87, 121–2n27 Cádiz, Spain, 86, 153, 155–6, 161–2n84 Café Suizo, 188 Calatrava religious order, 112–13 Calle de Alcalá, 64, 112–20, 113, 188 Calle del Caballero de Gracia, 113 Calle de los Peligros, 188, 189 Calle de Sevilla, 105–6, 107, 188 callejear, 132–3, 134–5, 159–60n56 caló, 155 Cánovas del Castillo, Antonio, 50 Cano y Olmedilla, Juan de la Cruz, 178, 179, 192, 193 captions, 213, 217, 219, 221, 235–6 Capuz, Tomás, ‘Madrid. La esquina de la Calle de los Peligros,’ 189 La Caricatura, 92, 123n46, 138, 150, 152, 217, 225, 231, 238, 239 caricature(s), 3, 4, 19, 165, 212–15, 225, 227–8, 234 see also social types Carlos, Abelardo de, 38, 86, 106, 181 Carrafa, Juan, 192, 193 Carrera de San Jerónimo, 137, 144, 145

Carretas, 144 Carriles Ramón, Los Madriles, 100–1 Carrión, Miguel Ramos, De Madrid a Biarritz, 210n92 cartes de visites, 46, 49, 182, 244 Casa de Correos, 59 El Cascabel, 222 castañeros, 178 Castellano, Manuel, 182 casticismo, 22n21 Castile, myth of, 203–4n3 lo castizo, 164, 203–4n3 Castro, Carlos María de, 52, 145, 192 Caygill, Howard, 140–1 Cerdà, Ildefonso, Teoría general de la urbanización, 64, 86 Cesari, Chiara de, 6, 186–7 Cevera Bachiller, Juan, ‘Antaño y hogaño. Estudio crítico-social,’ 118 change, 8, 10, 13 see also innovation; urban change character types, 6 see also social types Charnon-Deutsch, Lou, 15, 70n20, 75–6n105, 75n104, 165, 200 chroniclers, 3, 18, 26 chulos, 190, 225, 228–9, 229 ‘El ciego de la noria’ (The waterwheel blind man), 32 el ciego de los romances (the blind man of ballads), 33, 178 Cilla, Ramón, 92, 96, 99–101, 99, 138–9, 139, 175–6, 175, 217, 226–8, 226, 245, 230, 231, 249n3 cities experience of, 10, 26–77 flânerie and, 128–62 images of, 28, 50–62 modernity and, 12–13 representations of, 2, 15, 18, 28, 29, 50–68 urban change, 3, 7–8, 10, 17, 28, 138–40, 194, 196, 224–5, 233, 242 urbanisation and, 26–77 visual communication and, 26–77



Index 287

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

visual practices and, 14–17 see also specific cities class, 18, 201, 223, 224, 225, 233, 236, 242 see also specific classes Clifford, Charles, 102–12 Colección de Trajes, 178 collective memory, 6, 15–16, 148–9, 164–5, 172–4, 186–92, 224 Comba, Juan, 54–6, 57–8, 94, 104, 219, 219, 223, 236 communication, 2, 5, 12, 15 see also specific modes of communication Compañía Colonial, 68 conductors, 174, 175, 242 construction, 27, 102–12 consumerism, 8, 184, 196–7, 200–1, 222, 225, 249n3 continuity, 7, 9–10, 11, 172–85 El Correo de la Moda, 181 cosmopolitanism, 3, 11, 14, 18, 22n21, 155, 162n98, 164, 171–2, 258 cosmoramas, 29 costumbre, 230, 231 costumbrismo, 3, 59, 78, 90, 136–42, 153, 156, 163, 197, 200, 203n2, 215, 259 art and, 207n47, 235, 237 see also cuadros de costumbres collective memory and, 6, 164–5, 172–4 collective nature of, 202–3 costumbrista collections, 15 flânerie and, 129–30 hybrid style of, 216 international language of, 6, 164–72 modernisation and, 164 new social types and, 172–85 nostalgia and, 186–92 photography and, 207n47, 222–3, 243–4 popular culture and, 164–5, 168–9 print culture and, 5–6 realism and, 237

relationship between visual and literary, 165–72 romantic, 209n87, 216, 221 ‘segundo costumbrismo,’ 168–9, 216, 221, 247–8 self-referentiality and, 215, 216–17, 229, 230–3, 237–9 social critique and, 223–4 urban change and, 194, 196 visual language of, 18–19, 33–4, 164–72, 215–24, 222 see also artículos de costumbres; social types costureras see seamstresses Crary, Jonathan, 24n48, 29, 141 creativity, continuity and, 172–85 cross-cultural contact, 3, 4–5, 7, 10, 12–14, 18, 23n37, 27, 35–43, 257–8, 260 see also cosmopolitanism; internationalism Cruz, Jesús, 111 cuadros, 215 cuadros de costumbres, 166, 217, 221, 222–3, 231–2, 233, 237, 243 Cuba, 170 Cuchy, José, ‘Galería de tipos. La modistilla,’ 182, 183 ‘culte des images’ (cult of images), 48 cultural studies, 8, 15 culture, 14, 15, 16, 18, 200–2, 259–60 see also popular culture Curioso Parlante, 222–3 see also Mesonero Romanos, Ramón de currutaco, 153 cursilería, 161n81 customs, 6, 11, 12, 248 see also costumbrismo Daily Graphic, 46 dandi, 131, 149–56 Daumier, Honoré, 225, 253n74 de Certeau, Michel, 50–1, 66, 137 de Lacroix, Auguste, 132, 153 Delgado, Sinesio, 96, 99, 226, 249n3

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

288

Index

Delmas, Fermín, 192 demolition, 18, 102–12 del natural, 235–8 Derrida, Jacques, 88, 89–90 Día de los Santos Inocentes, 237–8 dialogue, 257 Díaz Huertas, Carlos Ángel, 197, 199, 245 Diccionario geográfico-estadísticohistórico de España y sus posesiones de Ultramar (Diccionario Madoz), 59, 62 Diccionario manual ilustrado de la lengua española, 134 Dickens, Charles, 29, 129 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 186 dioramas, 29 domesticity, discourses of, 170, 205n23 Drayton, Richard, 23n37 Durand, Godefroy, ‘Aspecto de los bulevares de París el día de año nuevo antes de la guerra,’ 109, 110 engraving, 17, 28, 233, 234–5 see also photoengraving Ensanche, 27, 145 entertainment, 6, 8, 11, 16, 17, 18, 22n21, 197–202 see also leisure; specific forms of entertainment ephemera, 15, 16, 29, 259–60 see also specific kinds of ephemera La Época, 103, 133–4, 143, 222 La Equitativa, 106, 108, 109 Erll, Astrid, 172, 200 La Esfera, 233 experience, 8, 11, 12, 17 Exposición Nacional de la Industria y de las Artes, 74n81 fashion, 18, 27, 184 Featherstone, Mike, 23n33 Fernández Bremón, José, 103–4 Fernández de los Ríos, Ángel, 44, 45, 62, 66, 113, 134–5, 141, 144–5

Fernández Flórez, Isidoro (Fernanflor), 155–6 Fernández y González, Manual, 117 Ferrer del Río, Antonio, Los españoles pintados por sí mismos, 30, 32, 212 Festivities of San Isidro, El tren botijo, 201–2 film, 203n1, 208–9n77, 259 La Flaca, 75n99 flanear, 134–5 flâneur, the, 5, 10, 18, 29–30, 128–62 Fliegende Blätter, 245 Flint, Kate, 33 Flores, Antonio, 33–4, 90, 177 Fontanella, Lee, 171 Foucault, Michel, 229–30 fountains, 19, 197, 200, 219, 259 Les français peints par eux mêmes, 129 France, 14, 29, 111 Francoism, 20–1n15, 208–9n77 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1, 38, 39 frissons, 140, 141 Frontaura, Carlos, 221–2, 242 Frost, Daniel, 209n87 Fusi, Juan Pablo, 8 Gaceta de caminos de hierro, 95 Gallicisms, 13 gallo social, 153 García Cadena, Peregrín, 135–6 gas lighting, 27 Gavarni, Paul, 153, 225 gazettes, illustrated see specific publications Generation of 1898, 8–9, 12, 82, 203–4n3 género chico, 16, 24n50, 163, 201, 203n1, 228 Gil Blas, 83, 86 Ginger, Andrew, 9, 10, 22n26 the global, 3–5, 7, 9, 11–14, 23n29, 27, 28, 112–13 globalisation, 4–5, 7, 11–12, 23n33, 23n37



Index 289

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

global studies, 11–12 the glocal, 13 Goya, Francisco de, 229 Graham, Helen, 9 Granado, Dionisio, 96, 97 graphic artists, 2, 3, 16, 17–18 see also specific artists Grases Riera, José, 106 Grassi, Ángela, 181 Graziani, Maximilien, Le Skating, 96, 98 Great Britain, 29, 111, 174, 178, 181, 207n47 gremios, 178 Gros, Julio, ‘Galería de tipos. El sabio de café,’ 173 Grower, William, 181 Guereña, José Luis, 142 guidebooks, 3, 15, 17, 27, 28 Guijarro, Miguel, Las mujeres españolas, portuguesas y americanas, 169 Haidt, Rebecca, 70n20, 178, 235 Halbwachs, Maurice, La mémoire collective, 172 Hall, Stuart, 24n44 Hamburg, Germany, great fire in, 112 Harvey, David, 22n24 Hatt, Michael, 255 Hauser y Menet, 24n47, 108, 197, 199, 210n93 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 60, 64, 103, 111 headings, 213, 217, 219, 221 Hernández Tomé, Francisco, 58–9, 58, 61, 62–3 high life, 18, 149–56 Hill, Jason E., 14, 35, 235 historieta, 153, 226 history, 3, 4–5, 12 Hobsbawm, Eric, 7 Hoffmeyer, Antonio, 133–4 Homann, Johann, 66 horchateros, 178 Huart, Louis,132, 136

humour, 19, 155–6, 165, 224–33 see also caricature(s); satire humour magazines, 165 see also satirical press; specific magazines hybridity, 9–10, 13, 14, 23n39, 212–54, 233–48 La Iberia, 40–1, 42 Iglesia de las Calatravas, 112–20, 113 Illustrated London News, 36, 37, 45, 194, 195 illustrated publications, 6, 27, 35–50, 243–5, 258, 259–60 see also specific publications and types of publications L’Illustration, 36, 37, 44 illustration(s), 14, 16, 18–19, 234–6 see also specific illustrations; specific media Illustrirte Zeitung, 36 La Ilustración, 36, 38, 44–5, 47 La Ilustración Artística, 46, 218, 223, 244 La Ilustración de Madrid, 36, 103, 106, 109 La Ilustración Española y Americana, 1–2, 36–8, 44, 46–7, 48, 52, 55, 56, 58–9, 58, 61, 64–5, 65, 71n41, 88–90, 95–6, 96, 103–6, 107, 109–10, 112–15, 135–6, 146–7, 147, 194, 196–7, 196, 198, 201–2, 210n92, 218–19, 219, 220, 225, 231, 233, 236, 240, 241, 242–5, 250n16, 255 La Ilustración Ibérica, 46, 242, 244 La Ilustración Nacional, 218 images, 2–3 image-making, 5, 8, 14–17, 26–77, 260 reality and, 255–6 text and, 19, 102, 215–24, 221 see also illustration(s); reproductions; specific media El Imparcial, 200 El Independiente, 83

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

290

Index

industrialisation, 7, 8, 10, 14, 27, 111, 225, 257 see also modernisation information, dissemination of, 14 innovation, 2–3, 11, 14, 18–19, 26–77, 233–4, 247–8, 258 see also change; specific technologies International Conference of Statistics, 143 internationalism, 2, 18, 164–72, 233, 247–8 see also cosmopolitanism inter-ocularity, 16, 24n48 introspection, 29, 135–41 Isabel II, 27, 102–12, 194 Isidro Labrador, San, 225 Italy, 140–1 Jagoe, Catherine, 207n61 Jay, Martin, 24n48 journalism, 3, 16–17, 18, 30, 202–3, 221, 225, 248 see also photojournalism; the press Joy, George W., The Bayswater Omnibus, 241 Junta de Estadística, 143–4 Klonk, Charlotte, 255 knowledge, 15–16, 43–50 Korhonen, Anu, 224 Kracauer, Siegfried, 129 Labanyi, Jo, 7, 9, 164–5, 208–9n77, 250n16 language, 3–5, 13, 19, 131–5, 216 see also visual communication; visual language; specific words Larra, Luis Mariano de, 132, 134 Larra, Mariano José de, 129, 132, 136, 190, 215 Larson, Susan, 9, 155, 203n1, 256 Lash, Scott, 23n33 laughter, 224–5 Laurent y Cía, Jean, 52, 54, 54, 59–2, 60, 61, 101–2, 101, 236–7, 243, 244, 253n80 Lauster, Martina, 35

lavanderas, 178 Lavapiés, 155, 194, 196, 196 Lawless, Geraldine, 208n72, 209–10n89 Lefebvre, Henri, 50–1, 66, 141 leisure, 2, 8, 16, 26, 27, 197–202, 225 see also specific activities Ley de policía de imprenta, 37, 41–2 Lisbon, Portugal, earthquake in, 112 literatura de cordel, 33 lithography, 5 littérature de mœurs, 231–2, 233 Llorens, Juan, Historia de un gallo social, 153, 154, 155 the local, 3–7, 9–14, 23n33, 27, 200 the cosmopolitan and, 18, 258 the global and, 3–5, 7, 11, 13, 14, 19, 27, 28 London, England, 10, 11, 17, 81–2, 104, 112, 190 López y López, Antonio, 41 lower classes, 174, 201, 224, 228–9, 229, 235–6 Luca de Tena, Torcuato, 245 Lumière brothers, 105 Luque, Manuel, 91–2, 91, 137, 138 Lustonó, Eduardo, 146, 221 Madoz, Pascual, 114 Madrid, Spain, 2, 3–4, 14–18, 22n21, 27–8, 74n81, 260 gas lighting in, 27 history and, 11–12, 14 population growth in, 27–8 the press and, 1, 16, 27–8 see also specific publications skating rinks in, 93–102, 123n54 water system in, 27, 194 see also specific locations Madrid Alegre, 228–30, 229, 231 Madrid Chismoso, 138–9, 139 Madrid Cómico, 36–7, 50, 75n97, 90, 96, 99–101, 99, 135, 138, 150, 151, 155, 175, 176–7, 177, 197, 217, 224, 225–8, 226, 238, 249n3 Madrid que se va, 223



Index 291

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Los Madriles, 153, 225 magazines, 1–3, 16, 18, 28, 29, 165, 224–33 see also specific publications and types of publications magic lanterns, 29 Mainardi, Patricia, 14, 123n46 majos, 228–9, 229 Manrique, Jorge, 187–8, 208n73 maps, 3, 15, 17, 27, 28, 62–8, 191–2, 191, 192 Le Marais, 136 Martínez de Velasco, Eusebio de, 147 mass culture see popular culture Matoses, Manuel, 128 Maurier, George du, ‘A choice of idioms,’ 93 May, Jon, 191 Mayhew, Henry, 30 meaning, construction of, 7–8, 14 Mecachis (Eduardo Sáenz Hermúa), 92, 123n46, 138, 150, 152, 217–18, 218, 226, 228–9, 229, 238, 239, 245, 250n16 mechanical reproduction, 14, 26 see also reproductions media, 1–4, 6, 14, 17, 19, 26–77, 259–60 see also specific media memory, 12, 18, 192–203, 223–4 collective, 6, 15–16, 148–9, 164–5, 172–4, 186–92, 200, 224 cultural, 173–84, 200 layers of, 112–20 nostalgia and, 186–92 popular culture and, 192–203 Méndez Bringa, Narciso, 240, 241, 242–3, 245 Mesonero Romanos, Ramón de, 29, 31, 58–61, 129, 135, 136, 147, 215, 223, 237, 243 mestizaje, 13, 23n39 middle classes, 14–16, 27, 165, 196–7, 200–1, 207n61, 245 migration, 5, 27, 145–6, 194 Milan, Italy, 104, 105 Mitchell, W. J. T., 102

La Moda Elegante, 72n45, 86–8, 87 La Moda Elegante Ilustrada, 181 La Mode Illustré, 72n45 modernisation, 2–4, 7–11, 15–18, 27–8, 102–12, 164, 174–5, 186, 207n47, 247–8, 257 modernism, 4, 6, 15, 233–4, 248, 259 modernismo, 249n4 modernity, 22n24, 23n33, 29, 119–20, 208n72, 250n16, 256–7 adjectives associated with, 9 as break or rupture, 9, 10, 11, 18, 19, 29, 234, 257–8 canonical texts of history of, 9–10 chroniclers and, 18 cities and, 12–13 concept of, 1–25, 257–8 continuity and, 7, 244–5, 257–8 Francocentric accounts of, 10–11, 22n26 global, 10–11 ‘glocal modernities,’ 13 history of, 3–4, 7, 9–12 meaning of, 2–3, 7, 17–18, 81–92 narrative of, 11–12, 19, 29 narrative of failed modernity in Spain, 11–12 nineteenth-century, 17–18, 26–77 tradition and, 9 trains and, 209–10n89 see also flâneur, the modistas see seamstresses Moral, Carmen del, 201 Morales, José Pilar, 65–7, 67, 192 Moreno, Cardinal, 61 Moreno Benítez, Juan, 114 Morgan, Emily, 234 Moriuchi, Mey-Yen, 168, 203n2, 207n47 Motadel, David, 23n37 El Motín, 50, 51, 75n99, 217 movement, 28, 50–68 see also transportation Mr. Punch on the continong [sic], 92 Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas, 169–72

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

292

Index

Las mujeres españolas, portuguesas y americanas, 169 El Mundo Cómico, 31, 91, 92, 91, 137, 138, 146, 179–80, 180, 182, 210n92, 231, 232, 237–8, Mundo Gráfico, 214, 233 El Mundo Pintoresco, 191–2 Muñoz, Domingo, 230, 230–1, 232, 237–8, 238 Museo ABC de la Ilustración, 75n97 Museo de Historia in Madrid, 75n97 Museo de las Familias, 34, 36, 166, 167, 178 El Museo Universal, 44, 45–6, 46, 86, 106, 177 Naples, Italy, 109 national identities, 5, 6, 12, 14, 23n33 nationalism, 6, 7, 12, 186–7, 203–4n3 naturalism, 216, 233, 238, 240 Nead, Lynda, 7, 11, 190, 207n47 Nerone, John, 35 newness, 4, 7, 9–11 see also innovation; novelty New York, New York, 13, 28, 64–5, 104 New York Times, 1, 114 Nombela, Julio, 88–9, 139–40 Nora, Pierre, 148 nostalgia, 11, 18, 164–5, 186–92 Novak, Daniel, 244 novelty, 4–5, 8, 9, 13, 260 Nuevo Mundo, 214, 233, 249n3 obreros, 242 observation, 29 see also flâneur, the Ochoa, Eugenio de, 145 Ogle, Vanessa, 12 omnibuses, 57, 64, 88, 89, 128, 143, 233, 240 optical technologies, 16, 29 Ortega, Marie-Linda, 15, 25n55, 125n85

Ortego, Francisco, 125n85 Ossorio y Bernard, Manuel, Viaje crítico alrededor de la Puerta del Sol, 147, 148 Otero Carvajal, Luis Enrique, 9, 127n110 Padró, Tomás, 57 painting costumbrista, 235, 237 see also cuadros de costumbres ‘del natural,’ 238–9 en plein air painting, 238–9 trope of the blind man in, 30 Palacio de Cristal, 74n81 Palacio de la Exposición de Bellas Artes, 74n81 Palacio Valdés, Armando, 145, 250n16 Palafox, Jordi, 8 paletos, 155 Pannemaker, Esteban, 37 O Panorama, 35 El Panorama, 35 panoramas, 16, 29, 217 Pardo Bazán, Emilia, 31, 159–60n56, 174–5, 223, 224, 228, 242 Paris, France, 10–11, 13, 17, 18, 28, 96, 104, 109, 111, 115, 156 modernity and, 80, 81–2, 257 renovation of, 60, 64, 103 see also flâneur, the Parsons, Deborah, 9, 155, 203–4n3 Partzsch, Henriette, 72n45, 170–1 pasear, 132 Paseo del Prado, 64, 142 Paseo de Recoletos, 27 paseo(s), 132, 135 Pellicer, Josep Lluís (José Luis), 57, 91, 92, 104, 137, 138, 146–7, 147, 150, 151, 155, 179–80, 180, 182, 197, 198, 226, 228, 235–6, 236 penny magazines, 29 Perea, David, 219, 220 Pérez Calvo, Juan, Los españoles pintados por sí mismos, 30, 32, 212



Index 293

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Pérez Galdós, Benito, 31, 47, 49–50, 145, 174–5, 201, 229, 240, 250n16 Pérez Zúñiga, Juan, ‘Un adorno,’ 238–9 periodicals, 16, 17, 25n55, 26, 28, 29, 218, 219, 260 see also specific periodicals and types of periodicals petimetre, 153 photoengraving, 5, 244–5, 252n55 photography, 18, 19, 26, 200, 215, 221, 233–7, 242–4, 247 costumbrismo and, 207n47, 222–3, 243–4 growing presence of, 19 innovations in, 177 ‘photographic consciousness,’ 244 realism and, 243–4 sketches and, 243–4 transition to, 243–5 photojournalism, 19, 215, 248 physiological literature, 29–30, 129, 134 physiological types, 6, 29–30 Piazza Colonna, 141 Piazza del Duomo, 104, 105 Picón, Jacinto Octavio, 225, 227–8 Dulce y Sabrosa, 49 the picturesque, 11, 18, 207n47 pintoresco publications, 35–6, 44 piri, 131, 153, 161–2n84 Planas, Eusebio, 205n24 Pla Vivas, Vicente, 15, 176, 216, 249n4 Plimpton, James Leonard, 95–6 pollos, 149–56, 219 Pons, Juan, 169–72 popular culture, 3, 6, 11, 12, 14–17, 22n21, 30, 164–5, 192–203, 259 portraits, 212–24 postcards, 3, 14–18, 148–9, 149, 197, 199, 199, 210n93, 253n80, 259 posters, 26 postnationalism, 187 Pradilla, Francisco, ‘En la fuente de Lavapiés,’ 194, 196, 196

Preciados, 144 Prensa Española, 214–15, 233 Prensa Gráfica, 214–15, 233 the press, 1, 8, 11, 13, 16–18, 28, 202–3, 221 comical, 15 see also humour magazines illustrated, 2, 4, 5, 6, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 35–43 laws regulating, 165, 201, 234–5 satirical, 6, 19, 137–9, 168, 172, 197, 215, 221, 224–33, 237–9 visual–verbal dynamics of, 215–24 see also specific publications print culture, 5–6, 26–77, 233–5, 259–60 printing industry, 3, 8, 12, 15, 26–7, 28, 233, 258 printing techniques and technologies, 14, 15, 26–8, 29 see also specific techniques and technologies progress, 26, 203–4n3 Przyblyski, Jeannene, 81 public space, 2, 18, 130–1, 141–56, 201, 222 publishing industry, 8, 13 see also print culture; printing industry Puerta del Sol, 1, 4, 18, 27, 52, 94, 104, 130–1, 137, 141–50, 155, 174, 188, 219, 228 collective memory and, 148–9 images of, 58–64, 58, 60 maps of, 67–8, 67, 191–2, 191 seamstresses in, 180, 182 study of, 143–4 Punch, 92 Punch’s Almanack for 1888, ‘A choice of idioms,’ 93 Rabaté, Colette, 121–2n27 Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 24n48 readership, 3, 15–16, 18–19, 27 Real Academia Española, 17, 23n39, 84, 86, 88–9, 90–1, 133, 229, 231

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

294

Index

realism, 139, 207–8n62, 216, 221, 233, 234–8, 243–4 reality, 1, 6, 15, 223–4, 234–9, 255–6 the regional, 4, 7, 11, 14 representation, 16, 18, 19, 29, 223–4 knowledge and, 15–16 mechanisms of, 2 modernity and, 256–7 new forms of, 29 nineteenth-century, 9, 17 reality and, 6, 234–6, 234–9 technological innovation and, 233–4 reproductions, 1–2, 5, 17, 27, 28, 29, 234, 234–5, 255–6 see also mechanical reproduction; specific media Restoration, 15, 27, 28, 47, 99, 114, 223, 227, 235 Revista General de Estadística, 143–4 La Revista Moderna, 249n3, 250n16 Riego, Bernardo, 15, 16, 244 Rigney, Ann, 6, 147, 148, 172, 186–7, 200 Ringrose, David, 8 Rinkomanía, 96 La Risa, 222 River Manzanares, 94 Robert, Roberto, 169, 221 Robinson, Jennifer, 109, 111 Roch, Léon (Francisco Pérez Mateos), 26, 43, 234–5 Rodríguez Correa, Ramón, 90, 216 roller skating, 5, 18, 93–102 romanticism, 6, 233 Rome, 140, 141 Romería de San Isidro, 197 romerías, 199–200 romeros, 155 Roudometof, Victor, 13 Ruiz de Velasco, Luis, 249n3 Ruskin, John, 46 Saboya, Amadeo de, 57 Sáenz Hermúa, Eduardo (Mecachis) see Mecachis

Sáez de Melgar, Faustina, 169–72, 222, 228 Sagasta, Práxedes Mateo, 37 Salón de Limpia-botas de Agustín Riquer, 31 Salvá, Eugenio, Nuevo diccionario de la lengua castellana, 84 Sanmartín y Aguirre, José F., 242 Santander, Spain, 197 Sartorius, Luis José, 191–2, 191 satire, 4, 6, 16, 18, 19, 223–33 satirical press, 137–9, 168, 172, 197, 215, 221, 224–33, 237–9 Scheidnagel, Manuel, 83–4, 85 Schropp, Carlos, 94 Schwartz, Vanessa R., 14, 35, 81, 234–5 seamstresses, 18, 172–85, 178–80, 179, 181–2, 207–8n62, 225, 259 ‘segundo costumbrismo,’ 168–9, 216, 221, 247–8 self-awareness, 4, 9, 11, 224, 229, 231, 233, 237–8, 257 Sellés, Eugenio, 17 Semanario Pintoresco Español, 30, 30, 33–4, 36, 44, 49, 52, 53, 59, 131–2, 174 ‘sensogramas,’ 217 Sepúlveda, Enrique, 94, 99, 221, 226–7 Sepúlveda, Ricardo, 136–7 sewing technology, 180–1 Sexenio Democrático, 15, 113–14 Shaw, Donald, 209n87 Sieburth, Stephanie, 200–1 El siglo futuro, 94 Silvela, Francisco, 113–14 Simmel, Georg, 10, 34, 129, 141 Sinués de Marco, María del Pilar, 86 ‘El Skating Rink,’ 93–102 sketches, 19, 27, 235–6, 243–4, 248 small talk, 141–9 see also sociability Smith, Adolph, Street Life in London, 243 sociability, 18, 135–56 social change, 3, 10



Index 295

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

social critique, costumbrismo and, 223–4 social mores, physiologies and sketches of, 29–30 social types, 6, 31, 156, 161–2n84, 172–85, 215, 219, 234, 242, 248, 259 albums of, 29–30, 168 European representations of Spanish, 206n30 illustrations of, 239–40 language of, 165–72 new, 172–85 portraits of, 212–24 reframing, 165–72 satire and, 224–33 sketching, 163–211 in Stanton’s Humans of New York, 212–13 taxonomies of, 217 urban, 188, 190 see also specific social types Sojo, Eduardo, 229–30, 51 El Solfeo, 47, 137, 146 Soria López, Mar, 207–8n62 space, 7, 15, 229–30 see also maps; private space; public space Spain, 8, 9 ‘las dos Españas, 21n17 imperial decline in 1898, 12 see also Generation of 1898 newfound prosperity in 1990s, 12 peripheral position of, 8 ‘el problema de España,’ 21n17, 164 ‘el ser de España,’ 21n17 see also specific locations spectatorship, 3, 13, 14–17, 19, 29–34, 258 Stanton, Brandon, 212–13 stereotypes, 1, 4, 170, 176–7, 205n23, 206n30, 213 see also social types; stock figures stock figures, 6, 11 street vendors, 18, 166, 172–85, 178 strollers, 149–56, 225 see also flâneur, the

tableux vivants, 29 Teatro de la Bolsa, 101, 123n54 teatro por horas, 201 technological innovation see innovation; specific technologies text, images and, 19, 215–24, 221 theatre, 201–2, 259 ‘thirdspace,’ 229–30 Thompson, John, Street Life in London, 243 Thrift, Nigel, 7, 191 time, 7, 186–92, 208n72 see also memory titles, 217, 219 tradition, 2, 9, 12, 203–4n3 Trafalgar Square, 149, 149 traffic, public space and, 143–5 trains, 27, 196–8, 209–10n89 see also specific types of trains trams, 64, 174, 222, 240, 242, 259 transportation, 8, 19, 27, 172–85, 192–203, 240, 242, 253n74, 259 see also specific modes of transportation travel literature, 17 El tren botijo, Festivities of San Isidro, 201–2 tren botijo, 19, 172–85, 197, 200, 201, 245–7, 246, 259 tren de recreo (económico), 196, 197–8, 210n92 typography, 19, 89–90, 200, 202, 213 see also visual–verbal dynamics Unamuno, Miguel de, 168, 203–4n3 universalism, 12, 171–2 urban change, 3, 7–8, 10, 28, 138–40, 194, 196, 224–5, 233, 242 urban historians, 11–12 urbanisation, 3, 7, 9–11, 14, 18, 26–77, 84, 86, 102–12, 191–2, 219, 225, 256–7, 260 urban life, 224–5 urban modernity, 12–13 urban planning, 27, 111–12, 191–2

296

Index

Downloaded from manchesterhive.com © Copyright protected it is illegal to copy or distribute this document

urban processes, global understandings of, 11–12 urban scholars, 11–12 Urrutia, Jorge, 240 Valera, Juan, 17 Valis, Noël, 9, 111, 142, 155–6, 161–2n84, 161n81, 162n98, 188 Valverde y Álvarez, Emilio, 63, 63, 64, 66 Versteeg, Margot, 99, 135, 137, 249n3 vision, city life and, 26–77 visual communication, 2–6, 9, 14–17, 19, 26–77, 164–5, 259 see also specific media

visual culture, 3, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14–18, 28, 256–60 visual studies, 14–17 visual–verbal dynamics, 148, 215–24 watchmen, 178, 215, 217, 225 water carriers, 192, 193, 194, 199–200, 225 women, 129, 170, 174, 205n23, 222, 240, 243 woodcut illustrations, 26, 235 working classes, 196–7, 235–6 zarzuelas, 100, 163, 197, 201, 210n92, 228, 242 Zerolo, Elías, 84, 229