ABSTRACT
In his London articles Sala had attempted to represent the city’s incongruities and anomalies and to find the key of the streets. By stressing the growing divide between rich and poor, while simultaneously becoming more conscious of the social connections between the classes, he had endeavoured to portray the ‘city-as-problem’ and not ‘city-as-spectacle.’ By contrast, his Parisian articles of the 1850s do not display such lofty ambitions. Not being as steeped in the history, culture, and personal experience of the streets of Paris, Sala comes at these streets as an outsider. His concern is not with solving the problems of Paris but in portraying the characteristics of the city and its citizens and revelling in the incongruities of modern life. He is essentially observing Paris as London writers like Pierce Egan in the 1820s observed their city, as a spectacle. Sala finds in Paris a society that is less concerned with morals and class boundaries, one that is politically more radical and open to new ideas, more inclined to be gregarious and to be involved in, and enjoy the love of, spectacle. Although there is some sense of nostalgia for a bygone Paris in Sala’s writing, it is usually where repression and ‘respectability’ have ousted the criminal and the dangerous. Sala would eventually come to embrace modernity in this most modern of nineteenth-century cities. The immensity, speed, and manic energy of London is transformed into a more pedestrian Paris, a city where strolling and observing, epitomised by the urban type of the flaneur, contrasts to working and producing. These contrasting images of London and Paris, however, do not seem to have come into conflict with each other in Sala’s imagination. They seem rather to have enabled him to embrace realist and imaginative qualities in his writing, qualities that may not have otherwise existed.
