Chapter 10 - ‘Diffusive Opulence’

Summary

10. Alison O’Byrne’s ‘Foreign Travellers’ Views of Romantic London’ acknowledges the ‘cultural cringe’ which many eighteenth-century Britons performed before their European counterparts, but also identifies a strain of Anglophile appreciation from visitors such as Voltaire onwards who saw London, via the Spectator, as a city which in its dynamism and prosperity exceeded comparison with any European rival. From the 1790s, as O’Byrne shows, other European travellers for the most part admiringly recognized London’s status as a commercial capital as exemplifying a practical sense of liberty, which they defined against the theory-inspired excesses of the French Revolution. While mid-eighteenth-century Britons often lamented its unremarkable appearance, London from the early nineteenth century became more architecturally impressive, partly through the commemoration of victory over Napoleon. As O’Byrne concludes, however, even the most enthusiastic accounts of London as a ‘world city’ were shadowed by a sense of the contingency and precariousness of this pre-eminence.