“Commonplace cohesion” and “tesselated” networks: John Davidson's “Fleet Street,” etheric chemistry, and fin-de-siècle aestheticism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See also Rudy 2009.

2 Though Davidson was very much a part of the London literary scene through his creative work and his reviews and articles in periodicals such as the Weekly Review and The Speaker, he seems to have never really felt at home in London’s literary life. He participated in the Rhymers’ Club, but he and Yeats quickly disliked each other and he never published in the any of the club’s collections. While Davidson was never able to achieve sustained popularity, his Fleet Street Eclogues did receive some positive reviews, and he did develop lifelong friendships with Max Beerbohm and Grant Richards early in his career.

3 For further discussion of Davidson’s relationship with Nietzsche and Haeckel, see Schäffner 2003, Robertson 1983, and Sloan 1995.

4 It’s worth noting here that Davidson had previously employed this technique in his best-known poem, “Thirty Bob a Week.” In his discussion of the poem, Peter Robinson attests to the significance of this move: “Davidson’s dislike of rhyme, and his masterful use of it in ‘Thirty Bob a Week’ to dramatize enduring necessity, shows in the penultimate stanza, where the clerk knows he was not consigned by nature or God to live that life; rather, his society conveniently underlines that the place he knows is destined and defined” (2013, 10).

5 Building on his ideas regarding blank verse and rhyme, Davidson privileged the ear above the eye since it was not so easily swayed by rhyme and decadence: “But in spite of the superiority of blank verse, the exquisite adornment of rhyme will continue to corrupt the ear, the seeing ear as well as the hearing ear; it is mainly with the ear the reader of poetry sees. A speculative writer suggested, once that the eye is a degenerate organ, the malversation of some higher perceptive power, inconceivable in range and penetration. By such an analogy the ear was originally intended for vision as well as audition; the tympanum and tympanic membrane, when one considers them, are clearly a combination of mirror and sounding-board. Why the mirror remains inoperative we cannot say, since no blind beggar has, up to this time of writing, developed vision by light refracted through the auditory canal; but the reader of poetry knows very well that the optic nerve responds like a taut string to the rhymes that vibrate in the membranous labyrinth of the ear; and he knows also that the prompt vision flashed on the inward eye by the percussion of rhyme has injured the palate of this double sense of seeing and hearing, so that the subtler sound and loftier sight transmitted by the rhythm of blank verse are hardly possible now to his over-stimulated, frayed, and angry senses” (1906, 149–150).

6 It’s worth noting here that, in The Triumph of Mammon, Davidson both claims that there are seven basic elements to ether, and allows that this may not be the final answer in terms of ether’s composition even though the number itself is very appealing, asking “Will the last analysis reduce the elements to seven? The salient conclusion is, at any rate, profoundly satisfying to a humane mind longing to find that there has been no waste of intellectual effort since the world began, and willing to believe, that those old gropers after truth, who made so much of the mystical number seven had within them subconsciously the root of the matter” (1907, 160–161).

7 See Maxwell 1878.

8 For further discussion of Victorian information technology, see Menke 2008.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Hager (they/them)

Lisa Hager is an Associate Professor of English and Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at Waukesha, where they coordinate the College of General Studies Honors Program. They also edit, along with their colleague Dr. Anna Maria Jones, the academic journal Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism. Their current book project looks at the intersections of trans studies and Victorian studies, and they have published articles on Victorian sexology, the New Woman, aestheticism and decadence, steampunk, digital humanities, and trans and queer studies.