The City of London, Real and Unreal.

LONDON (England); ENGLAND

The abstraction that accompanied the growing financialization of the Victorian economy required a reconceptualization of the geographical space at the center of that economy: the City of London. This essay traces how mid-century writers both mourned and helped advance the transformation of what had been a place of lived, affective experience into metaphor for commerce and a repository of public labor. Though the City's transformation from private to commercial space was far from complete, journalists and others during the period stressed the gradual expiration of the signifiers of private life and their replacement by a cultural graveyard given over to commerce, a space where the histories of individual experience gave way to the records of depersonalized labor that characterize the modern financial capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Victorian Studies is the property of Indiana University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)