Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot

Much has been written about cultural imperialism and the effectsof Britain and British culture on colonized people, but Joseph McLaughlin suggeststhat the influence worked both ways. Focusing on the relationship between theliterature of British imperialism and turn-of-the-century metropolitan culture, Writing the Urban Jungle offers an account of the cultural confusion cau

Much has been written about cultural imperialism and the effectsof Britain and British culture on colonized people, but Joseph McLaughlin suggeststhat the influence worked both ways. Focusing on the relationship between theliterature of British imperialism and turn-of-the-century metropolitan culture, Writing the Urban Jungle offers an account of the cultural confusion caused bybringing the foreign home.

Narrative, plots, andlanguage formerly used to describe the colonies, McLaughlin argues, became ways ofreading and writing about life in London, "that great cesspool into which allloungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained," as Arthur Conan Doyle'sDr. Watson describes it in A Study in Scarlet (1887), the initial Sherlock Holmestale. Canonical and popular literature by Doyle, Margaret Harkness, Joseph Conrad, and T. S. Eliot, and the literature of social reform and urban ethnography byGeneral William Booth of the Salvation Army and Jack London all display thisinversion of colonial rhetoric. By deploying the metaphor of "the urban jungle,"these writers reconfigure the urban poor as "a new race of city savages" and readurban culture as a "Darkest England," an Africa-like place rife with danger andnovel possibilities.

Drawing from and extendingthe field of criticism pioneered by Edward Said, Writing the Urban Jungle presents apowerful new paradigm for reading late-Victorian, modernist, and postcolonialliterary and historical texts. It also provides a fresh tool for urbananthropologists working in our own fin-de-si cle.