London Calling

In 1833, the young Ralph Waldo Emerson, having shed his Unitarian shackles--traveling light and eager to broaden his horizons--set out for the “old country,” forearmed with a handwritten list of luminaries with whom he hoped to rub shoulders, swap insights and improve the shining hour. Seven months later, he returned home, fired by the friendship he had forged with the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle (No. 1 in his catalog of Greats) but otherwise a prouder American, glad to be free of England, whose first-class minds--for all their wealth of eloquence and erudition--he had deemed spiritually bankrupt. Nonetheless, by the early ‘40s, the apostle of self-reliance was scribbling, “People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”

Stifled by the clear air, tranquility and crisp moral climate of Concord, Mass., in search of cash and of followers farther afield than his own nation--Emerson’s musings revolved once more toward the Motherland’s retrograde enrapturements--in ‘47, he headed back, on a high-profile English lecture tour. No longer the gauchely reverential colonial pilgrim at Carlyle’s gates but a full-fledged house guest, Emerson descended on the London household of his soul mate, in no doubt of his welcome as the renowned voice of Transcendentalism and a visiting Yankee celebrity.

Tensions, however, ran high chez Carlyle for the duration of his stay, and disenchantment festered in the mighty bosoms of the erstwhile confreres. The American visitor found his cheese-paring irascible host “not mainly a scholar ... but a very practical Scotchman, such as you would find in any saddler’s or iron dealer’s shop ... displeased & hindered by all men & things about him,” while Carlyle was driven to distraction by his guest’s exhausting inclination for chatting high-mindedly into the wee watches, his “moonshine” philosophy “elevated but without breadth.” This transatlantic tragicomic tableau of the epic duo unwittingly enacting the Emersonian maxim that “every hero becomes a bore at last” sparkles amid an embarras de richesses of such vignettes in Rupert Christiansen’s “The Victorian Visitors: Culture Shock in Nineteenth-Century Britain.”

Christiansen’s latest offering is an intriguing successor to his previous polished and provocative 19th century studies, “Romantic Affinities” and “Tales of the New Babylon: Paris, 1869-1875.” An illuminating romp through that vibrant hotbed of culture and commerce, London, throughout Britain’s 100-year heyday following the fall of Napoleon, “Visitors” offers a magic lantern of shifting perspectives of the glittering city--filtered through the preconceptions, triumphs and defeats of a varied galaxy of foreigners (illustrious or otherwise), who sought fame and fortune under her auspices and of the natives who watched them flounder and triumph.

In an introduction of elegant simplicity, Christiansen delineates the unifying theme of his treatment of figures as disparate as the Olympian Richard Wagner, gifted as the gods and as self-aggrandizing, to the amphibious Daniel Home, social-climbing, psychic, preeminent among Yankee “spirit-rappers,” or the Ballet Russe’s fabulous and farouche Vaslav Nijinsky, whose social gaucheries startled English society almost as profoundly as his terpsichorean graces.

Scrabbling for funding, grumbling about the weather, the Victorian visitors were drawn to the English capital’s glowing promise of power and prosperity. London in the 1800s--the author persuasively argues--remarkably receptive to alien flockers to her flame, was closer in spirit and function to present-day New York than to the insular supremacist bastion of Imperial Britain’s official ideology and of latter-day supposition:

“In our subconscious, in our dreams, 19th century Britain still appears as ‘Victorian England’--a dark and narrow place, dominated by Evangelical Christianity, reeking of drains and hemmed in by corsets: we do not want to linger there ... whatever our secret heart-swelling at the idea of ‘Victorian values’.... But of course, Britain between the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 wasn’t really ‘Victorian’ at all.... In significant respects it was a society much less neurotic and inhibited than our own: Even if it twitched about the matter of sexual intercourse, it was burdened with neither the Freudian scrutiny of the deeper regions of the self, nor the blackest horrors of genocide and totalitarianism. In consequence, it could take a lot at face value, in a spirit of cheerfulness, tolerance, and good faith ....”

Yet--as the dour Carlyle reputedly observed of his times: “If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.” In other words: Lionizing was leavened with mockery--as Christiansen recognizes and reveals from varying perspectives.

Riotous images of Fanny Trollope (formidable mother of the epic Anthony) discoursing on American boorishness or of grumpy, dumpy Louie Fuller, the exotic dancer from the Midwest, offering la-di-dah phooey-isms on high art and enthralling English audiences, from the swells in the boxes to the “bearded Vorticists and their molls” in the cheap seats, with her “teetotum spin” are intercut with brilliantly poignant evocations of alien sensibilities: The tumultuous eroticism of the morbid and fiery French painter Theodore Gericault’s depictions of horses--all wind-flecked forelocks and heaving rumps--is shown in eloquent contrast to the brusque equine subjects of English sporting-prints, proprietarily posed; Nijinsky, “like so many shy people

More essayist than historian or biographer, Christiansen is an exquisitely witty writer with an approach to cultural history both singular and sapient. With an intimate, nuanced sense of irony and vivid, idiosyncratic juxtapositions and groupings of personae, time and place, he summons the reader to savor his subject with an entre nous urbanity that delights but never trivializes. “Visitors” lingers as lovingly over England’s reception of an Antipodean Aborigine cricket team as over that which it accorded Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa”--an epic portrayal of a disaster at sea, springing from scandalous preferment in the French maritime ministry and ending in shipwreck, madness and cannibalism--imported and touted for its titillating topicality by Bullock, the Regency’s answer to P.T. Barnum.

“Visitors” winds down as the sparks of English liberalism are submerged by the spluttering propaganda of the first world war, as cleverly typified by a quotation from an editorial of 1915: “We shall hear no more of the pretty-pretty babblers, with their Bond Street barbarism and their rococo recklessness ... the rabble of literary and artistic lunatics provided slender entertainment for empty days; but our minds are empty no longer; and we have no time to waste on monkeys on sticks.”

But it wraps up on a regenerative note, with a flicker of liberal spirit escaping the sodden deluge, like the glimmer of Hope from Pandora’s box:

“Yet there was a deeper spirit in England ... a spirit which reached out to welcome and embrace the foreign (‘and what should they know of England’ as Kipling asked, ‘who only England know?’), a spirit of cultural open house....

“We have the visitors to thank for that.”

So concludes this marvelous book. *