ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Johanna Schopenhaue's viewing practices inform the textual descriptions she used and how, by evoking sympathy on the part of the reader with the figures portrayed, the representational strategies sought to offer an affectively engaging account of Britain. A detailed reading of her travel account of Britain, the Reise durch England und Schottland, aims to demonstrate firstly why, according to the aesthetic theories current at the time, the inclusion of industrial labour in landscape scenes was so problematic. Then it explores why she deliberately chose to invest such interest in these figures and asks how both moral and social constraints on the depiction of the labouring poor affected her aesthetic representation of them. The chapter considers how two other aspects of early nineteenth-century performing art — the Attitude and the lebendes Bild ('tableau vivant') — influenced the modes of representation Johanna Schopenhauer used to portray figures sympathetically in her account of her journey through Britain.
