IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section B

Abstract

By the nineteenth century, Holywell Street in the heart of London was a short narrow passage parallel to the Strand, the major thoroughfare between the financial and commercial powerhouse of the City of London and the political, ecclesiastical, and cultural centres of Westminster, Knightsbridge, and Mayfair. Holywell Street consisted of run-down Elizabethan and Jacobean houses with ground floor shops, some selling second-hand clothing and others publishing and selling cheap books and pictures. The former were associated with Jewish merchants; the latter with ‘pernicious literature’ liable to corrupt youth and women. ‘Pernicious literature’ here included reformist politics, religious scepticism and ‘irreligion’, sensational and ‘indecent’ fiction, and ‘obscenity’ and ‘pornography’ ranging from information on sexuality to erotica. Media commentators, moral crusaders, religious evangelizers, jingoists, and politicians increasingly used ‘Holywell Street’ to symbolize alien, unmodern, and corrupting forces undermining Britain’s modern national character, international moral and cultural leadership, imperial power, and global commercial and industrial dominance. Calls to both demolish Holywell Street and abolish ‘Holywell Street’ in order to modernize London, Britain, and the empire were heard from the 1830s and finally effected at century’s end, ostensibly to modernize London by widening the Strand. To some extent this ‘Holywell Street’ has persisted, however, even in academia. The alternative detailed reading of ‘Holywell Street’ offered here sees it as wellspring of cheap print enabling formation by readers of an alternative, plebeian modernity of political, social, sexual, religious, and cultural dissidence still alive in commercial and subcultural popular arts.