in a footnote added to the 1892 German reissue of his book, Engels felt the need to qualify that moment on deck:
This was so nearly fifty years ago, in the days of picturesque sailing vessels. In so far as such ships still ply to and from London, they are now to be found only in the docks, while the river itself is covered with ugly, sooty steamers.3
By the end of the century, Engels knew that his earlier rhetorical strategy had rested on an aesthetic and spatial contrast that had lost its validity, a contrast between the “picturesque” (malerische) port and the “ugly” city. Like Joseph Conrad, who described a steam tug as “an enormous and aquatic black beetle” leaving an “unclean mark” on the waves, Engels now found nothing to celebrate in the maritime use of steam. The city, and the factory system behind the city, had devoured any difference–or beauty–the river had to offer. But this obliteration of the river’s “difference” is already prefigured in the earlier text: as the river narrows it becomes less like a port and more like a city street.4
The “magnificent” (grossartig) scene on the Thames leads on to the dismal alleys of Manchester. At the outset, industrial capitalism is prefigured through its older mercantile counterpart, culminating in the image of the small steamships, that “dart rapidly to and fro,” sharing their motive force with the modern factory. From this point on the text is permeated with the metaphor of steam: society is a contained and superheated gas under increasing pressure. The working-class slum is the ultimate locus of this looming explosion, of atomized forces that threaten to build and rupture the cast-iron walls of the urban factory-boiler. Engels was to push his Hobbesian prophecy to its grim limit in the concluding chapter of his book: “The war of the poor against the rich will be the most bloodthirsty the world has ever seen.”5
Engels’ narrative begins at sea, in maritime space, a space defined in many of its distinctive features by an earlier preindustrial capitalism, a capitalism based on primitive accumulation and trade. When it was initially seized by the imaginary and made pictorial as a coherent and integrated space rather than as a loose emblematic array of boats and fish and waves, maritime space became panoramic. Its visual depiction even today conforms to models established by Dutch marine painting of the seventeenth century. It is in these works that the relationship of ships to cities is first systematically depicted. Obviously, the various historical modes of picturing maritime space should be distinguished from any provisional list of actual maritime spaces: the ship itself, the hinterland, the waterfront, the seaport, breakwaters and seawalls, coastal fishing villages, islands, reefs, the beach, the undeveloped shoreline, the pelagic space of the open sea, the deeps, and so on. (I include the hinterland here because it is terrestrial space defined in its spatial relationship to the seaport.) One can produce other, more strictly functionalist or legalistic typologies: strategic naval space, fisheries, trade routes, national and international waters, exclusive economic zones, free ports. And yet, on a fundamental level, there is a strong connection between the qualities of boundedness or openness of these worldly spaces and the possibilities imagined in pictorial representation. Over time, this relationship became partially reciprocal, and some maritime spaces, those devoted to touristic pleasures, were developed to conform to pictorial exemplars.
The panorama is paradoxical: topographically “complete” while still signalling an acknowledgement of and desire for a greater extension beyond the frame. The panoramic tableau, however bounded by the limits of a city profile or the enclosure of a harbor, is always potentially unstable: “If this much, why not more?” The psychology of the panorama is overtly sated and covertly greedy, and thus caught up in the fragile complacency of disavowal. The tension is especially apparent in maritime panoramas, for the sea always exceeds the limits of the frame.
It is in early seventeenth-century Dutch legal theory that the sea is emphatically understood to exceed and even resist terrestrial boundaries and national proprietary claims. Writing in defense of the interests of the Dutch East India Company against Portuguese claims to exclusive trading rights in the southwest Pacific, Hugo Grotius spoke, perhaps somewhat cynically, of
… the OCEAN, that expanse of water which antiquity describes as the immense, the infinite, bounded only by the heavens, parent of all things. … the ocean which … can neither be seized nor enclosed; nay, which rather possesses the earth than is possessed.6
Thus the sea’s infinitude gives rise to a doctrine of free trade well before it provides a basis for eighteenth-century aesthetic notions of the sublime. Panoramic maritime space in Dutch painting is implicitly “open” in this preromantic sense: open to trade, a net cast outward upon a world that yields property but that in its idealized totality is irreducible to property. When protoromanticism is later confronted with this uncommodifiable excess, it transforms it into the sublime, taking it initially as proof of divinity; only later is the category naturalized and psychologized:
A troubled Ocean, to a Man who sails upon it, is I think, the biggest Object that he can see in motion, and consequently gives his Imagination one of the highest kinds of Pleasure that can arise from Greatness. I must confess, it is impossible for me to survey this World of fluid Matter, without thinking on the Hand that first poured it out.…7
In its blunt and clever materialism, seventeenth-century Dutch painting had not yet reached this point: the hands that mattered most in contemplating the sea were those of the shipwright and the seafarer. Svetlana Alpers has characterized the “descriptive” and “topographic” mode of Dutch painting in these terms:
Like the mappers, [Dutch painters] made additive works that could not be taken in from a single viewing point. Theirs was not a window on the Italian model of art but rather, like a map, a surface on which is laid out an assemblage of the world.8
Alpers’ account of Dutch topographic methods invites us to consider a mobile spectator, more inquisitive than acquisitive, a crypto-cartographer, and not the fixed humanist subject of Renaissance Italian perspective. Nonetheless, the seventeenth-century Dutch still lived in a world in which commodification, while everywhere expanding, was not yet universal.
There is a profound historical shift in the passage from a seventeenthcentury world view that recognizes a formal legal limit to the additive “assemblage of the world” and one that submits the totality to the same pecuniary accounting procedures with which it had grasped the fragments. That latter world had arrived with the factory system by the middle of the nineteenth century, thrusting the confidence and measure of older panoramic methods into crisis, while simultaneously routinizing the mechanical panoramic possibilities of the camera. The prototypically “Dutch” mobile spectator had been transformed into a figure of passive consumption. Dolf Sternberger argued that steam-powered travel by rail had submitted the world to a new panoramic spectacularity:
The railroad elaborated a new world of experience, the countries and oceans, into a panorama.… it turned the eyes of travellers outward, offering them a rich diet of changing tableaux, the only possible experience during a trip. 9
Sternberger assumed that the rapid linearity of railroad travel extended even to the view from coastal tracks onto the sea, but implicitly this passage suggested that even sea travel had succumbed to the railroad model, for otherwise how could the oceans truly have become panoramic?
It is true that steam travel by sea developed from steam travel by land, and thus was a step forward in the increasing dominion of the land over the sea. The gigantic transatlantic steamer Great Western of 1838 was the logical outward extension of its designer Isambard Brunel’s earlier project, the Great Western Railway. But the monotony and malaise and occasional terror of pelagic space, the space of the “middle passage,” resisted conversion into “a rich diet of changing tableaux,” whether or not one’s ship was powered by wind or steam. The opulent interior spaces of first-class travel on the steamships of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods may well have been designed to compensate
