Gustave Doré’s London / Londres : empire and post-imperial ruin
2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/02666286.2014.938528
ISSN1943-2178
Autores Tópico(s)Travel Writing and Literature
ResumoAbstractGustave Doré’s wood-engraving, ‘Macaulay’s New Zealander’ in London: A Pilgrimage by Doré and Blanchard Jerrold (1871–72) is reprinted in Londres by Louis Énault (1876), which is a French printing of most of the images from London: A Pilgrimage, accompanied by a new French text, only distantly related to Jerrold’s. Between Doré’s drawing for the engraving in 1869 and its publication in Paris in 1876, not only has the image crossed the Channel into new cultural contexts, but the meanings produced by the image have been changed by the historical circumstances of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. Indeed the relevance of this image of metropolitan ruin to post-bellum and post-Commune Paris even produces a French figure who is the equivalent of the New Zealander, the New Caledonian. The cultural pecking-order (as it were) of London and Paris has changed over a few years (albeit temporarily), and the image, which originally is rather whimsically predictive of London’s eventual fall, becomes many times more vivid in damaged and painfully degraded Paris.Keywords: Blanchard JerroldLouis Énaultwood-engravingthe Siege of Paristhe New ZealanderThomas Babington MacaulayAlfred Franklin ACKNOWLEDGMENTSI am extremely grateful to Mme Marie Thompson, Conservateur au Département des estampes et de la photographie at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, for generously giving her time to help me to access and understand the artist’s proofs to Doré’s Londres (1876).Notes1 – Gustave Doré, ‘Macaulay’s New Zealander’, wood-engraving, engr. Pannemaker fils, 237 mm x 188 mm; in Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (London, 1871–72 and 1872), facing p. 188, and Louis Énault, Londres (Paris: Hachette et Cie, 1876), 423.2 – I use the conventional shorter forms of the names of Doré and Jerrold, rather than ‘Paul Gustave Doré’ and ‘William Blanchard Jerrold’. For a general account and estimation of Doré’s career and output, and of wood-engraving in France in the nineteenth century, see Philippe Kaenel, Gustave Doré: Réaliste et visionnaire, 1832–1883 (Genève: Bevaix, [1985]); Eric Zafran, Robert Rosenblum, and Lisa Small, Fantasy and Faith: The Art of Gustave Doré (New York: Dahesh Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Philippe Kaenel, Le Métier d’illustrateur 1830–1880: Rodolphe Töpffer, J.-J. Grandville, Gustave Doré (Paris: Éditions Messene, 1996; Genève: Droz, 2005).3 – Frederick George Stephens (anon.), The Athenaeum, n° 2306 (January 6, 1872): 23. I am grateful to the library of City University for access to the marked editorial file of The Athenaeum.4 – I shall refer to the two English and French versions as ‘1872’ and ‘1876’ respectively. I have used as my authority a copy of 1872 in the Guildhall Library, London, which is bound from parts in the publisher’s cloth. I note that both 1872 and 1876 differ in important respects from later photographic reproductions, which remain silent as to their omissions.5 – Francis Haskell, ‘Doré’s London’, in Past and Present in Art and Taste: Selected Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 129–40. For a rather different view of the subject, see Alan Woods, ‘Doré’s London: Art and Evidence’, Art History 1 (1978): 341–59.6 – Blanche Roosevelt, Life and Reminiscences of Gustave Doré (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1885), 368–70. See also Jean Laran and Jean Adhémar, Inventaire du fonds français après 1800, 15 vols. (Paris: M. Le Garrec, 1930–67; repr. BnF, 1971), 3: 260: Émile Bourdelin (fl. 1854–1878) – ‘Ingénieur et dessinateur industriel, qui a collaboré avec divers graveurs sur bois’. See also Annie Renonciat, La Vie et l’œuvre de Gustave Doré (Paris: ACR Édition/ Bibliothèque des arts, 1983), 198–99.7 – Blanchard Jerrold, Life of Gustave Doré (London: W. H. Allen, 1891), 204–5.8 – ‘Lambeth Gasworks’, engraver unidentified, 249 mm x 185 mm – BnF call no. Doré VII Dc 298.h. G140407-G140498; facing p. 40 in 1872, and p. 419 in 1876.9 – The image from the engraved English title-page does not appear in any of the copies of 1876 which I have seen. The engraving is included in the list of illustrations in 1872, but not in 1876.10 – ‘The river glideth at his own sweet will’, William Wordsworth, ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’, l. 12.11 – George Godwin, Town Swamps and Social Bridges (London: Routledge, Warnes, & Routledge, 1859), 52.12 – This vignette appears with the legend ‘Régates (Le départ)’ in 1876, 208.13 – 1872, 113; 1876, 76; engr. Quesnel, 99 mm × 169 mm. Doré pictures the early morning workmen’s train on the oldest stretch of the Metropolitan Railway. The Robert dictionary reports that ‘le métropolitain’ was first used in French to designate London’s ‘metropolitan railway’ in 1874, the first Parisian métro line opening in 1900.14 – The inscription over the gate to Hell in Dante, Inferno (3.2 and 9): ‘per me si va ne l’eterno dolore / … Lasciate ogne speranza’ (‘through me is the way to eternal pain / … abandon every hope’).15 – Frédéric Fort, Paris brûlé (Paris: E. Lachaud, 1871), 6.16 – Ibid., 130.17 – Paris dans sa splendeur, 3 vols. (Paris: H. Charpentier, 1861–1863).18 – Victor Fournel, Paris et ses ruines en mai 1871, précédé d’un coup-d’œil sur Paris, de 1860 à 1870 (Paris: Henri Charpentier, 1872), i and vi–vii. All translations in this article are my own.19 – Victor Hugo, Paris, in Actes et Paroles, ed. Jean Massin, in Victor Hugo: Œuvres complètes, 18 vols, vol. 13 (Paris: Le Club français du livre, 1967–70), 591.20 – Jean-Pierre A. Bernard, Les Deux Paris. Les représentations de Paris dans la seconde moitié du xixe siècle (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2001), 227–31.21 – There is no complete account of anticipated ruinism in both French and English. For the French tradition, see Philippe Junod, ‘Ruines anticipées ou l’histoire au futur antérieur’, in L’Homme face à son histoire (Publications de l’Université de Lausanne. Cours général public; 1982–1983. Lausanne: Payot Lausanne, 1983). For the English tradition, see David Skilton, ‘Tourists at the Ruins of London: The Metropolis and the Struggle for Empire’, Cercles, Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone 17 (2007): 93–119, http://www.cercles.com/n17/special/skilton.pdf (accessed August 20, 2014).22 – Constantin François de Volney, Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires, 2nd ed. (Paris: Desenne, Volland, Plassan, 1792), 11–12.23 – Thomas Babington Macaulay (anon.), review of Leopold von Ranke’s The Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries [Die römischen Päpste], trans. S. Austin, 3 vols. (London, 1840), The Edinburgh Review 72 (October 1840): 227–58. For Edward Gibbon’s remark on a possible future civilisation in New Zealand, see his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, 3 vols. (London: Allen Lane, 1994), 1: 1001. The relevant volume of the first edition was published in 1780.24 – Fort, Paris brûlé, 127.25 – See Renonciat, La Vie et l’œuvre de Gustave Doré, 198.26 – The New Zealander was an everyday commonplace in the London of the 1860s. In ‘A Proclamation’, Mr Punch bans the use of ‘certain persons, objects, and things’ which are ‘used up, exhausted, threadbare, stale and hackneyed’, top of the list being ‘Macaulay’s New Zealander’: ‘The retirement of this veteran is indispensable. He can no longer be suffered to impede the traffic over London Bridge…. May return when London is in ruins’. Punch 48 (January 7, 1865): 9.27 – Aeneid, 2.324.28 – Louis Énault, Paris brûlé par la Commune (Paris: Plon, 1871), Aeneid, 1.462: ‘sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt’ – ‘these are tears for events, and mortal things touch the soul’. Both authors use the traditional Church spelling ‘lacrymae’. Other lines from Aeneid quoted in Fort and 1876 include 2.5 and 3.11.29 – Henry James detects decline under the confidence of this decade. See Henry James, ‘London at Midsummer’, Lippincott’s Magazine 20 (November 1877): 603–11.30 – Macbeth, 1.5.17.31 – Alfred Franklin, Les Ruines de Paris en 4875 (Paris: L. Willem, 1875). See also P.-O. Lissagary, Histoire de la Commune de 1871 (Paris: Maspero, 1970; first pub. 1876), 408. See also Nina L. Dubin, Futures and Ruins. Eighteenth-Century Paris and the Art of Hubert Robert (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011), esp. 128.32 – For the author’s account of the appearance of part of his work in periodical form, see his ‘Préface’ to the new book edition published in 1908 with a new title which maintained the distance between the present of the publication and the future of the action: Les Ruines de Paris en 4908 (Paris: E. Flammarion, 1908).33 – Théophile Gautier, Tableaux de siège, Paris, 1870–1871 (Paris: Charpentier, 1871), 325.34 – Ibid., 310–15. See Alisa Luxenberg, ‘Creating Désastres: Andrieu’s Photographs of Urban Ruins in the Paris of 1871’, Art Bulletin 80, no. 1 (March 1998): 113–137, 119; Victor Hugo, Choses vues, 1870–1885, ed. Hubert Juin (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 131 and 390, 6 January 1871: ‘Les Parisiens vont, par curiosité, voir les quartiers bombardés. On va aux bombes comme on riait au feu d’artifice. Il faut des gardes nationaux pour maintenir la foule [Parisians go out of curiosity to see the bombed quarters. One goes to see the bomb-damage in the way one used to enjoy fireworks. National Guards are needed to control the crowd]’.35 – (Anon.) ‘When The New Zealander Comes, by Prof. Blyde Muddersnook, P. O.Z.A.S.’, Strand Magazine 42 (September 1911): 284–91.36 – See Fort, Paris brûlé, 188–89.
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