Pedestrian crossings: urban movement in early nineteenth-century periodicals

Charles Baudelaire states flâneurs are able 'to see the world, to be at the center of the world, yet to remain hidden from the world' (1986:9). In his discussion of Baudelaire's poetry from mid-nineteenth-century Paris, Walter Benjamin asserts the flâneur 'goes his leisurely way' (2006a:85) along the arcades, unscathed by the crowd. Benjamin's analysis of the flâneur has drawn this sauntering urban movement into critical focus. My thesis critiques flânerie by arguing for different models of movement in the early nineteenth-century city and showing the political, social, and critical stakes of the representation of urban movements in literature.
The flâneur still receives critical attention, as evident in Lauren Elkin's Flâneuse: Women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London (2016) and Matthew Beaumont's The Walker: On Losing and Finding Yourself in the Modern City (2020). Both these critics extend and put pressuire on the meaning of the term. I intend to undermine the flâneur differently: by showing how crowdedness often taints and prevents flânerie as a result of colliding and communal movements in public.
Between 1800 and 1840, London becomes more crowded, which is reflected in the desire to devise a vocabulary that captures new urban experiences in periodical essays and serial fiction. My research spans the rise of literary magazines from The Examiner's 'The Round Table' essays (1815-7) to Charles Dickens' 'Sketches by Boz' (1833-6). It provides proper literary treatment of this under-researched corpus, the body of work that made Dickens possible. But the periodical literature of this period is more than preparatory. It is a repository of stylish, ground-breaking urban writing.
I work with a range of periodicals, such The London Magazine, The Monthly Magazine, and The Examiner. The writers I study include Thomas Hood, B. W. Procter, T.G. Wainewright, Caroline Bowles, Mary Russell Mitford, Pierce Egan, William Hone, William Hazlitt, Thomas De...