London can also be taken as the capital of the nineteenth century, based on its exemplary individualism The nineteenth century was indeed often spoken of as the Age of Individualism, a phrase Alexis de Tocqueville coined in the second volume of Democracy in America. The brave side of individualism may be self-reliance, but Tocqueville saw its more melancholic side, which he conceived as a kind of civic solitude. “Each person,” he wrote, “behaves as though he is a stranger to the destiny of all the others. . . . As for his transactions with his fellow citizens, he may mix among them, but he sees them not; he touches them, but does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone. And if on these terms there remains in his mind a sense of family, there no longer remains a sense of society.”
Individualism of this sort, he thought, might bring a certain order to society-the co-existence of people inward-turned, tolerating one another out of mutual indifference. Such individualism had a particular meaning in urban space. The planning of nineteenth-century cities aimed to create a crowd of freely moving individuals, and to discourage the movement of organized groups through the city. Individual bodies moving through urban space gradually became detached from the space in which they moved, and from the people the space contained. As space became devalued through motion, individuals gradually lost a sense of sharing a fate with others.
The triumph of Tocquevillian individualism in London was very much on the mind of the novelist E. M. Forster in 1910 when he wrote Howard: End. His book opens famously with the epigraph, “Only connect. . .”, a social as much as a psychological command. Forster’s novel shows us a city that seems to hold together socially precisely because people don’t connect personally; they live isolated, mutually indifferent lives which establish an unhappy equilibrium in society.
The novel reflects upon London’s extraordinarily rapid transformation during the larger urban revolution; as to many others of his time, speed seemed to Forster the central fact of modern life.
Regent Street was an epochal event in urban design. It coupled a continuous, heavy traffic stream to single-function use at ground level. This organization of the street created a division between the sweet and the territory behind the street lining, as in the park Nash bunk to the north. Commerce did not overflow into the side streets; the carriage trade could not penetrate far into the ancient tangle, and the orientation of the pedestrian flow of the Street, as in a basilica, lay along the spine rather than at right angles to it. The single-function street created a spatial division akin to the division of labor, the street line serving only the purposes of up-market trade while spaces nearby served craft or business functions which had no necessary relation to the street.
The ensemble of Regent’s Park and Regent Street gave a new social meaning to motion. The use of traffic to insulate and thin out space, as occurred in Regent’s Park, diffused the gathering of a purposeful crowd. The pressure of linear pedestrian movement on Regent Street made, and still makes, it difficult for a stationary crowd no form, to listen to a speech, for instance. Instead, both street and path privileged the individual moving body. To be sure, Regent Street was itself, and remains, anything but lifeless.
....the prevailing imaginary landscape of London [shifted] from one that was geographically bounded to one whose boundaries were indiscriminately and dangerously transgressed."‘The transgressors were far more likely to be shoppers than thieves. Yet if the Underground system of arteries and veins in London created a more mixed city, this mixture had sharp limits in time. During the day, the human blood of the city flowed below ground into the heart; at night, these subterranean channels became veins emptying the mass out of the center, as people took the Underground home. With mass transit on the model of the Underground, the time geography of the modern urban center had now taken form: density and diversity by day, sparsity and homogeneity by night. And that mixture by day implicated no strong human contact between the classes. People worked and shopped and then left for home.
3. COMFORT
In the poetry of Baudelaire, speed was depicted as a frenetic experience, and the speeding urbanite as a man or woman living on the edge of hysteria In point of fact, speed took on a different character in the nineteenth century, thanks to technical innovations in transport. These made the travelling body comfortable. Comfort is a condition we associate with rest and passivity. The technology of the nineteenth century gradually made movement into such a passive bodily experience. The more comfortable the moving body became, the more also it withdrew socially, travelling alone and silent. Comfort is of course a sensation easy to despise. The desire for comfort has a dignified origin, however, as an effort to rest bodies fatigued by labor. During the first decades of factory and industrial labor in the nineteenth century, workers were forced to continue at their tasks without a break throughout the day as long as they could stand or move their limbs. By late in the century, it became evident that the productivity of such forced labor diminished as the day progressed. Industrial analysts noticed the contrast between English workers, who by the end of the century worked mostly ten-hour labor shifts, and German and French workers, who labored in twelve, or sometimes fourteen-hour shifts: the English workers were far more productive by the hour. The same difference in productivity appeared among manual laborers who worked on Sunday versus manual laborers who were given the Sabbath to rest; the workers who tested on Sunday worked harder the rest of the week.
Market logic suggested to crude capitalists like Henry Clay Frick that the “better sort of worker" was a laborer who wanted to work all the time, a worker whose energies were aroused by the chance to push his body to the limits in order to make money. But fatigue spoke practically of a different economy. In 1891, the Italian physiologist Angelo Masso was able to explain the relation between fatigue and productivity. He showed, in his book La Fatica, that people feel fatigued long before they are incapable of further effort; the sensation of fatigue is a protective mechanism by which the body controls its own energies, protecting it from injuries which “lesser sensibility” would cause to the organism.” The onset of this protective sensation of fatigue defines the moment when productivity begins sharply to drop.
The pursuit of comfort in the nineteenth century has to be understood within this sympathetic context. Comfortable ways to travel, like comfortable furniture and places to rest, began as aids for recovery from the bodily abuses marked by sensations of fatigue. From its very origins, though, comfort had another trajectory, as comfort became synonymous with individual comfort. If comfort lowered a person’s level of stimulation and receptivity, it could serve the person at rest in withdrawing from other people.
The chair and the carriage
The ancient Greek in his andron, or the Roman couple in their triclinium, lay sociably on their sides or stood sociably. This sociable posture of the body at rest contrasted to the “pathetic” or vulnerable posture of sitting, as in the ancient theatre. In medieval times, sitting in a near squat became a sociable position, though dependent upon the rank of the sitter. The most common piece of furniture made for rest was the low stool without a back, or low chests; chairs with backs were reserved for people of rank. By the seventeenth century an elaborate etiquette determined how and when and with whom people sat, as in Louis XIV’s Versailles. A countess had to stand in the presence of a princess of the blood, but could sit on a stool in the presence of a princess not collaterally related to the King; the princesses of both sorts sat in chairs with arms, except in the presence of the King or Queen, when a non-collateral princess then stood up, and a princess of the blood could remain seated but only in a chair without arms. Standing became a deferential position; everyone from princesses to servants stood in the presence of their social superiors who enjoyed the comfort of sitting.
In the Age of Reason, chairs became vessels for more relaxed site ting positions. reflecting a gradual relaxation of manners from the court patterns of Versailles. The back of the chair became as important as the seat, and the back sloped, so that the sitter could lean into it; the arms were lowered so that the sitter could move freely from side to side. This change became marked around 1723, appearing in informal chairs with names invoking Nature like the bergére. the “shepherd's chair,” upon which no real shepherd was ever likely to sit. The furniture maker Roubo remarked that in such chairs a person can rest his or her shoulder against the chairback, “while leaving the head entirely free to avoid disarranging the hair either of the ladies or the gentlemen.” Eighteenth-century comfort thus meant freedom of movement even while sitting, the sitter leaning to one side or another, talking easily to people all around. This freedom to twist and move while sitting marks the simplest chairs of the eighteenth century as well as the most expensive; the beautiful wooden “Windsor” chairs which graced poor English and American houses at the time supported the back, as did the aristocrat’s bergere, while opening wide to free the rest of the body.
Nineteenth-century chairs subtly but powerfully changed this experience of sitting sociably; they did so thanks to innovations in upholstery. By 1830, manufacturers of chairs used springs beneath the seats and on the backs; over the springs the manufacturers set heavy cushions, using for stuffing either pleated horsehair or the wool combings which were by-products of the new mechanized spinning machines. The chairs, divans, and sofas thus became enormous in size, overstuffed by design. The French upholsterer Detvilliets began to manufacture such chairs in 1838, calling them “comfortables." He followed with various models such as the confortable senateur of 1865 and the confortable gondole of 1869, which was like a boat into which the sitter lowered him or herself at the side. In all these “confortables” the body sank into the enveloping structure, engulfed and no longer easily moving. As the processes of mass manufacturing advanced, particularly in the mechanical weaving of cushions, the chairs came within the reach of a large public. The “comfortable chair" in a worker or clerk‘s home served as a point of pride and a place of respite from the cares of the world. Comfort in these chairs came to imply a particular kind of human posture, the historian Siegfried Giedion believes, “based on relaxation in a free, unposed attitude that can be called neither sitting nor lying" by comparison to earlier ages.
The nineteenth-century sitter engaged in a ritual of relaxation by sinking into the upholstered chair, his or her body immobilized. This same surrender marked the nineteenth-century rocking chair. In its eighteenth-century form, as in the Windsor rocking chair, the soothing motion comes directly from the push of the sitter’s feet; when nineteenth-century manufacturers added springs to these chairs, more complicated mechanical motions resulted. In 1853 the first American patent was issued for what we now call the tilting office chair, at the time known simply as a sitting chair. Its rocking action via springs and coils meant that “relaxation” is derived from small and often “unconscious shifts of position.” Leaning back in a spring-held, tilting office chair is a different physical experience from leaning back in a wooden rocking chair; to experience comfort, the body moves less; the springs do the work of the feet.
The junction of comfort and passive bodily surrender appeared in the most private of seated acts. The development of flush toilets in the middle of the nineteenth century continued the eighteenth-cem (my drive toward hygiene. But the vitreous-glass toilet bowls and wooden seats of the Victorian era far surpassed utilitarian concerns, Their bowls cast in fanciful shapes and their porcelain painted, the more exuberant of these toilets were meant to be furniture; their manufacturers anticipated that people would test when sitting on them, just as people tested in other chairs. Some were outfitted with magazine racks, others with holders for glasses and plates; an ingenious “rocking Crapper”-named after its inventor-was even launched upon the seas of Victorian commerce.
Defecation became a private activity in the nineteenth century entirely unlike the habit people had a century earlier of talking to friends while sitting on a chaise-percé beneath which lay a chamber pot. In the chamber which now contained bath, sink, and toilet, one sat quietly, thinking, perhaps reading or taking a drink, and literally let go, completely undisturbed. This same withdrawal occurred in easy chairs in more public parts of the house, chairs in which a person exhausted after work had the right not to be disturbed.
Sitting while travelling came to follow the same trajectory of individualized comfort. Dervilliers’ techniques of upholstery spread to the design of carriage interiors; the springs underneath carriages became ever more cushioning against jolts. The comfort of the carriage made its increase in speed bearable to passengers, who in older vehicles had suffered most when the carriages went fast.
These changes altered the social conditions of travel. The nineteenth-century European railway carriage placed its six to eight passengers in a compartment where they faced one another, a seating Plan derived from the large horse-drawn coaches of an earlier era. When it first appeared as train seating, the historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues, this arrangement provoked a sense of “the embarrassment of people facing each other in silence," for now the cover of noise in the horse-drawn carriages was gone. The comfortable smoothness of the railroad carriage, however, permitted people to read by themselves.
The railway carriage filled with close-packed bodies who read or silently looked out the window marked a great social change which occurred in the nineteenth century: silence used as a protection Of Individual privacy. On the streets, as in the railway carriage, people began to treat as their right not to be spoken to by strangers, to treat the speech of strangers as a violation. In Hogarth’s London or David’s Paris speaking to a stranger carried no connotation of violating his or her privacy; in public people expected to talk and be talked to.
The American railroad carriage, as developed in the 1840s, put its passengers in a position which virtually assured the desire to be left alone in silence. Without compartments, the American railroad carriage turned all passengers looking forward, staring at one another’s backs rather than faces. American trains frequently travelled immense distances-by European standards--yet it struck Old World visitors that one could cross the North American continent without having to address a word to anyone else, even though there were no physical barriers between people in the carriage. Before the advent of mass transport, the sociologist Georg Simmel remarked, people had rarely been obliged to sit together in silence for a long time, just staring. This “American” way of sitting in public transport now also appeared in Europe in the ways people sat in cafes and pubs
Cafés on the European continent owe their origins to the English coffeehouse of the early eighteenth century. Coffeehouses began as mere appendages to coaching stations, others as self-contained enterprises. The insurance company Lloyds of London began as a coffeehouse, and its rules marked the sociabillty of most other urban places; the price of a mug of coffee earned a person the tight to speak to anyone in Lloyd’s room.
More than sheer chattiness prompted strangers to talk to one another in the coffeehouse. Talk was the most important means of gaining information about conditions on the road, in the city, or about business. Though differences in social rank were evident in how people looked and in their diction, the need to talk freely dictated that people not notice, so long as they were drinking together. The advent of the modem newspaper in the later eighteenth century sharpened, if anything, the impulse to talk; displayed on racks in the room, the newspapers offered topics for discussion-the written word seeming no more certain than speech.
The French café of the Ancien Regime took its name from and operated much like the English coffeehouse, strangers freely arguing, gossiping, and informing one another. In the years before the Revolution, political groups often arose from these café encounters. At first many different groups met in the same café, as in the original Café Procope on the Left Bank; by the outbreak of the Revolution, contending political groups in Paris each had their own place. During and after the Revolution the greatest concentration of cafés was in the Palais-Royal; here, early in the nineteenth century an experiment began which was to transform the café as a social institution. The experiment was simply to put a few tables outside the Wooden galerie du bois running through the center of the Palais Royal. These outside tables deprived political groups of their cover; the tables served customers watching the passing scene, rather than conspiring with one another.
The development of the great boulevards of Paris by Baton Haussmann, particularly in the Second Network streets, encouraged such use of outdoor space; the wide streets provided much more space for the café to sprawl. Apart from the cafés of the Second Network, there were two centers of café life in Haussmann’s Paris, one clustered around the Opéra, where the Grand Café, the Café de la Paix, and the Cafe Anglais were to be found, the other in the Latin Quarter, whose most famous cafés were the Voltaire. the Soleil d'Or, and Francois Premier. The clients of the great cafés were in the nineteenth century drawn from the middle and upper classes, the price of drinks discouraging poorer customers. Moreover, in these vast cafes, Parisians acted like Americans in their trains; the café-goer expected that he or she had a right to be left alone. The silence of people in these large establishments proved uncongenial to the working classes, who clung to the sociability of the café: intimes in the side streets.
At an outdoor table in the big café one was expected to remain seated in one place; those who wanted to hop from scene to scene stood at the bar. The speed of service for these fixed bodies became slower than for the standing patrons. In the 1870s, for instance, it became a common practice for the oldest waiters to be relegated to the outer tables of cafes, their slowness no failure in the minds of these patrons. On the terrace, the denizens of the café sat silently watching the crowd go by-they sat as individuals, each lost in his or her own thoughts.
By Forster’s time there were a few big French-style cafés in London near Piccadilly Circus, but the more universal drinking place in the city was, of course, the pub. For all their coziness, Edwardian pubs in London had assimilated some of the public manners of their continental café-cousins; if people talked freely standing at the bar, elsewhere they could sit, silent and alone. Cafés for the most part in Paris were as much neighborhood affairs as were London pubs; ‘in the boulevard, Opera and Latin Quarter café, the backbone of trade was the habitué rather than the tourist or the elegant out with a demi-mondaine." Of course the pub did not relate spatially to the street as did the cafe; it appeared as a refuge space, fragrant inside with the comforting mixed smells of urine, beer, and sausage. Yet the Parisian dawdling on a café terrace also was disconnected from the street; he or she inhabited a realm rather like that of the American travelling across a continent in silence, the people on the street now appearing as scenery, as spectacle. “Half an hour spent on the boulevards or on one of the chairs in the Tuileries gardens has the effect of an infinitely diverting theatrical performance.‘ the traveller Augustus Hare wrote." Or, in bath pub and cafe, this spectacle could take place in the theatre of one's private thoughts while one sat.
The exterior crowd composing itself into a spectacle no longer carried the menace of a revolutionary mob-nor did people on the street make demands on the person nursing a beer or a fine.
'ln 1808,police spies looking for dangerous political elements in Paris spent a great deal of time infiltrating cafes; in 1891, the police disbanded the bureau dedicated to cafe surveillance. A public realm filled with moving and spectating individuals-in Paris as much as in London-a no longer represented a political domain.
Like the chair, the café thus provided a space of comfort which joined the passive and the individual. Yet for all this the café was, and remains, intensely urban and urbane. One was and is surrounded by life, even if detached from it. The space of comfort took another turn inward when urban architecture began to be mechanically sealed.
Sealed space
The designers of the eighteenth century had sought to create a healthy city on the model of a healthy body. As the urbanist Reynet Banham has observed, the building technology of that time hardly served this purpose; buildings were both drafty and stuffy, the movement of air in them irrational, the loss of heat, when heating existed at all, extravagant. In the late nineteenth century, these difficulties of respiration within stone began to be addressed.
The advent of central heating may not seem a great event in the history of Western civilization, any more than the invention of the overstuffed chair. Yet central heating, like later advances in interior lighting, air conditioning, and the management of waste, did create buildings that fulfilled the Enlightenment dream of a healthy environment-at a social price. For these inventions isolated buildings from the urban environment.
We owe to Benjamin Franklin the concept of heating a room with radiating hot air, rather than an open fire. Franklin created the first “Franklin stove” in 1742. The inventor of the steam engine, James Watt, heated his own offices by steam in 1784; large buildings began to be steam-heated early in the nineteenth century. The boiler which produced the steam could also produce hot water, distributed by pipes to each room where needed, rather than carried there by servants who heated water in the kitchen. In 1877, Birdsill Holly conducted experiments in New York aimed at providing several buildings with steam heat and hot water from a single boiler.
The problem with these inventions was two~fold: the buildings were so poorly insulated that the hot air seeped outside; they were so poorly ventilated that hot air did not move inside. The ventilation problem could be. and was in part, solved through the development of forced-air heating in the 1860s by the Sturtevant Company, but this new technology still suffered from the evils of leakage. When architects began to seal buildings, they could also address the probIem of efficient circulation of air, directing its fiow within the building and sucking stale air outside. The development of effective, flexible insulating materials came late, in the 1910s and 1920s; nineteenth-century efforts focused on effective sealing through design. One way of doing so was to use new materials like continuous sheets of plate glass to clad window openings, a development that first occurred in department stores in the 1870s; the other was to make ventilating ducts do the work formerly done by windows. The giant Royal Victorian Hospital, completed in 1903 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, made ducts work in this way.
Sealing buildings also succeeded thanks to advances in lighting. The gaslights of nineteenth-century buildings usually leaked, often dangerously so. Thomas Edison’s assembly of materials to make electric light became by 1882 a reference point for British builders in new construction, as it became in France and Germany a few years later. In 1882, electric lights for street lighting also began to replace gaslights. The development of electric light for large urban buildings meant that interior spaces could become even more usable, and more independent from the windows giving onto the street; eventually the window could be done away with, in buildings entirely filled with uniform electric light. The new technology broke the necessary lighting tie in earlier construction between inside and outside.
All of these technologies could be installed in existing urban buildings. The electric lights, for instance, could be fitted into the older gas sockets; heating pipes and ventilator ducts could be cut into floors or put in stairwells. The greatest source of physical discomfort in large buildings, however, generated a new urban form. This was the effort of walking up many flights of stairs; overcoming the rigors of vertical ascent through the technology of the elevator gave birth to the skyscraper. The elevator began to be used in buildings In 1846, at first powered by men pulling on counterweights, later by steam engines; the Dakota Apartment House in New York and 1N Connaught Hotel in London used water hydraulics to move the p18? form up and down. The fortune of the elevator depended on i“ safety, and Elisha Graves Otis in 1857 made it a safe machine bY inventing automatic locking brakes in case power failed.
We take elevators so much for granted that we do not readily perceive the changes they have wrought in our bodies; the aerobic strain of climbing has been largely replaced by standing still in order to ascend. The elevator, moreover, has permitted buildings to become sealed spaces in an entirely new way; one can in a few seconds time move far from the street and all it contains. in modern buildings which couple their elevators to underground garages. it is possible for a passively moving body to lose all physical contact with the outside.
In all these ways, the geography of speed and the search for comfort led people into the isolated condition which Tocqueville called “individualism.”
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