Representing Commerce in Tallis’s London Street Views

Abstract

This essay examines how the London Street Views organize the city as a space of commercial interaction, one that is curiously at odds with an image of crowded Victorian streets full of shoppers, street-sellers, advertisements, and window displays. As a commercial directory, it is at once tightly self-referential and open ended, cross referring information between the lists of businesses, the advertisements, and the street elevations while also including advertisements for shops in other streets and neighbourhoods than that focused on in each issue. This essay considers the distinctiveness of Tallis’s project by contextualizing his Street Views within a range of forms of urban commercial information, including directories and advertisements.

Keywords:

• Tallis
• London
• advertising
• commerce, street views
• directories
• shops

Notes

1. Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 5.

2. Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (London: Verso, 1991), p. 3.

3. Richards, The Commodity Culture, p. 50.

4. John Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 8.

5. Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture, p. 14.

6. Jeffrey A. Cohen, ‘Corridors of Consumption: Mid-nineteenth Century Commercial Space and the Reinvention of Downtown’, in Visual Merchandising: The Image of Selling, ed. by Louisa Iarocci (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 19–36 (p. 19).

7. John Tallis, Tallis’s London Street Views, 88 numbers (London: John Tallis, 1838–1840), title page to each number.

8. Caroline Arscott, ‘The Representation of the City in the Visual Arts’, in Cambridge Urban History of Britain, ed. by David M. Palliser, Peter Clark, and Martin J. Daunton, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000–2008), III, 811–31 (p. 814).

9. Arscott, ‘The Representation of the City’, p. 814.

10. Tallis, London Street Views, title page.

11. Charles W. F. Goss, The London Directories, 1677–1855: A Bibliography with Notes on their Origin and Development (London: Denis Archer, 1932), pp. 130–32.

12. Claire Walsh, ‘Shop Design and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of Design History, 8:3 (September 1995), 157–76, (p. 160).

13. Tallis, London Street Views, number 4, p. 1.

14. Tallis, London Street Views, number 12, p. 1.

15. Tallis, London Street Views, number 17, n.p.

16. See Tallis, London Street Views, number 16.

17. Sir John Soane’s Museum, George Scharf: From the Regency Street to Modern Metropolis (London: Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2009); Peter Jackson, George Scharf’s London: Sketches and Watercolours of a Changing City, 1820–1850 (London: John Murray, 1987); Alison O’Byrne, ‘George Scharf’s London Scenes’ London Journal, 37.3 (November 2012), 215–233, and Frederic S. Schwarzbach, ‘George Scharf and Early Victorian London’, in Victorian Artists and the City: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Ira B. Nadel and Frederic S. Schwarzbach (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), pp. 93–105.

18. Paul Dobraszczyk, ‘The Language of the Walls: Victorian Posters’. Available at: https://ragpickinghistory.co.uk/2012/07/13/the-language-of-the-walls-victorian-posters/ (accessed 25 January 2017).

19. Tallis, London Street Views, number 17, p. 2; number 28, p. 2; number 65, p. 1; number 1, p. 1.

20. James Dawson Burn, The Language of the Walls: And a Voice from the Shop Windows. Or, the Mirror of Commercial Roguery (Manchester: Abel Heywood, 1855), p. 34.

21. Strachan, Advertising and Satirical Culture, p. 14, pp. 22–24; Nicholas Mason, Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), pp. 19–20.

22. Tallis, London Street Views, number 34, pp. 1–2.

23. Tallis, London Street Views, number 34, p. 2.

24. Tallis, London Street Views, number 36, n.p.

25. Tallis, London Street Views, number 36, p. 2.

26. Tallis, London Street Views, number 41, p. 1.

27. David Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (Columbia, NY: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 40.

28. Tallis, London Street Views, number 17, p. 4.

29. Tallis, London Street Views, number 17, p. 4.

30. Tallis, London Street Views, number 28, n.p.; number 4, n.p.; number 44, n.p.

31. Henkin, City Reading, p. 52.

32. Elizabeth Grant, ‘John Tallis’s London Street Views’, London Journal, 37.3 (November 2012), 234–51.

33. Tallis, London Street Views, number 43, n.p.