The "Good Lamp is the Best Police" Metaphor and Ideologies of the Nineteenth-Century Urban Landscape
1991; American studies; Volume: 32; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2153-6856
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoEmerson slips in an unusual analogy in the middle of his essay on Worship: As is the best nocturnal so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity. * The assumption that gaslight is the best nocturnal is striking. Only fifty years before he made this point there was no gaslight; there were not even police as we now know them. And yet both author and audience knew the connection between street lighting and police so well that Emerson could use that shared assumption to move on to universal matters. The metaphor, gaslight is the best nocturnal police, can tell us much about the shared value system and ideology of urban citizens who had to cope with immense change that always threatened to dissolve into social disorder. In the nineteenth century, cities expanded and transformed internally, while at the same time they seemed ever more distant from nature. Meanwhile, new technologies that could be used for water, sewage and gas utilities and pavement became available for citizens to manage the growing metropolis. The usefulness of the new technologies depended in large measure on the perception of need, and those perceptions were nested in the value system of the growing numbers of middleand upper-class nineteenth-century urban residents. Why should lights attract our interest? Clean water and adequate waste disposal may have been far more important for the functioning of nineteenthcentury towns, but they were hidden underground, and the ultimate enemy, the germ, was a small and oft misunderstood foe. Lights, on the other hand, conquered darkness and all that lurked therein, real or imagined. Street lights betokened war on criminals, war on poverty, war on the unenlightened. In time,
Referência(s)