The “Shows of London” and Late Eighteenth-Century British Novels
The “Shows of London” and Late Eighteenth-Century British Novels

Author(s): Mary Newbould
Subject(s): Cultural history, 18th Century, 19th Century
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: London; novels; statuary; tourism; waxworks
Summary/Abstract: This chapter explores the experience of domestic tourism to London as represented in eighteenth-century British novels, focusing on Tobias Smollett’s 'The Expedition of Humphry Clinker' (1771) and John Alcock’s 'The Adventures of Miss Fanny Brown' (1761). Both novels, alongside other contemporaneous fictions, incorporate an array of tourist experiences that exemplify the diversity of the city’s entertainments as explored in Richard Altick’s classic study, 'The Shows of London' (1978). They mix together highbrow and “popular” entertainments in such a way as to challenge apparently rigid classifications not only of different types of sight, but of spectator. As such, they contribute towards undermining views prevalent in the eighteenth century regarding educated spectators and those of lower social ranks and, by extension, education levels, typically considered to be more easily enthralled by “crass” shows and entertainments. The novel, itself sometimes derided in the period for being “popular”, provided an apt space for challenging these ideas through recounting the varied perspectives of its protagonists, using a range of narrative strategies. Scepticism towards “wonder” dissolves in the pleasurable immersion some novelistic characters express in a variety of entertainment experiences, a hybridity embodied in the contrasts, and similarities, between viewing the venerable monuments of Westminster Abbey, among them funereal statuary, and the figures represented at London’s popular waxwork showrooms.

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