Introduction

The city speaks of intimacy and isolation; of crowded tenements, teeming streets and dingy alleyways; of jostling commerce, civic grandeur and genteel elegance. Street hawkers, opportunistic musicians and prostitutes mix with labourers, bustling servants and sharp-eyed shopkeepers, while the fashionable pass by in carriages or stroll in parks and public gardens. The relationship between gender, space and identity was, Shirley Ardener argued, reflexive: space reflected social organisation. This chapter explores representations of gender and space in art and literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries respectively, yet they reveal very different responses to the urban experience. The ways that community relationships were inscribed through space is brought out clearly by Amanda Flather's study of male domestic servants and apprentices in eighteenth-century English towns. The urban experience reflects the cultural and intellectual currents of the day, the prevailing economic climates and the unresolved tensions in the lives of their inhabitants.