Urban Typologies and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Conder’s Melbourne Sketchbook (1888)

Focusing on Charles Conder's overlooked sketchbook, this article analyses the artist's experiments with illustration. Drawing on Phil May's cartoons in The Bulletin, the sketchbook engages urban typology to record Melbourne's street life subjectively and selectively. Examining the female stroller and larrikin, the article argues that Conder's penchant for fashion offered insight into the interplay of aspiration, impropriety, and respectability in Melbourne. Situating Conder as flâneur—his fashionable attire inseparable from his role as observer—the article proposes that his sketches align with a kaleidoscopic mode of seeing: fragmentary, multiplied, and ambiguous, mapping hierarchies of class, gender, and respectability through a single perspective.