ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses the two volume series of vignettes that comprise The Social Kaleidoscope in the context of a broader cultural analysis of the pervasive use of kaleidoscopic metaphors of London life, ranging from Charles Dickens to Albert Smith's popular Gavarni in London: Sketches of Life and Character. Then to the impressionistic melancholy of Arthur Symons's London: A Book of Aspects. In these accounts, kaleidoscopic metaphors oscillate between evoking positive associations with a self-consciously cosmopolitan gaze open to diversity and equally suggestive negative associations with the alienating inter-changeability of standardized market driven spectatorship. George Sims's idea of kaleidoscopic vision both captures the way emotion clouds perception and registers the impact of the destabilizing effects of perpetual mobility and transformation that characterized fin de sicle urban experience. This conception of the kaleidoscope's aesthetic and cultural effects resonates strongly with early nineteenth-century usage, when Brewster's invention first became part of the visual vernacular.