Making liberalism durable: Vision and civility in the late Victorian city

Recent scholarship on nineteenth-century liberalism has utilized Foucault's idea of 'govern-mentality' to examine how liberal ideas of the free subject, society and economy, through which the state generated its wealth and well-being, were used as modes of rule. Here, two possibly neglected aspects of this project are analysed: first, the material rebuilding necessary to make cities key sites for liberal rule, and second, how the subjects' visual capacities were particularly implicated in this spatial reordering. Liberal society was often conceptualized visually--civil conduct had to be open to free, mutual inspection, which could not occur in cramped, tangled spaces. This article explores three material technologies introduced to embed and make durable these civil, visual conditions. Smoke-abatement systems aimed to make urban air transparent and salubrious; plate-glass foregrounded the visual at the expense of the auditory and olfactory; and new paving technology aimed at securing the salience of the visual by muffling sound. However, their success was circumscribed by several factors, which lead to a series of conclusions. Matter's brute resistance suggests that historians perhaps need to address the material agency of infrastructure and the role of maintenance in securing the form of the liberal city while, as analysis of smoke-abatement shows, there was some ambivalence towards visuality within bourgeois sensibility itself.