to an all-consuming opticality lingered well into the modern period, most emphatically for those passengers unable to afford the outward view from the promenade deck or its inner surrogate in the grand saloon. Thus the sea’s “excess” is not easily superseded by modernization.
Standing on the deck of his ship as it sailed upriver to London, Engels was straddling two very different ideas of panoramic space: the older panoramic tableaux of the Dutch and the new mobile panorama of an accelerated age of steam. He described a liminal maritime space that was just beginning to be enveloped by the polluted miasma of urban industry. This “enveloping” eventually rendered the older notion of the panorama obsolete, or at least anachronistic, in its reassuring depiction of a clear division between ships and the land, and ships and the sea.
This collapse, or blurring, of panoramic maritime space in painting was first grasped by J.M.W. Turner, in works produced coincidentally with the first appearances of oceangoing steam-driven ships in the decade preceding Engels’ voyage up the Thames. This is not to reduce the Turneresque sublime to a simple technological determinist explanation, but rather to suggest that a painted sky that presumed the wind to be a motive force had a different referential status from one in which steam and smoke were introduced as evidence of new powers. Steam cut an imaginary straight line through a space previously governed by the unpredictability of the wind. Paradoxically, however, steam made the possible directions of movement less evident in the aggregate view of ship and sea and sky. A line of smoke from a funnel is not always an indication of the vector available to or taken by a ship. Only if the speed of the ship greatly exceeds that of the wind, or if the ship steams directly into the wind, will this line indicate the ship’s path. Weather became paramount in painting as its actual power over human movement diminished, and transit times became more predictable. Turner’s exorbitation of weather occurred at the very historical moment when it was widely imagined to be vanquished.
Fig. 1 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Snow Storm-Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth, oil on canvas, 1842.
Engels’ implicitly romantic attitude toward the sea and seafaring–his sense of a heroic and even redemptive potential of the sea–required that his literary description of the approach to London on the Thames, while couched in the language of the romantic sublime, conform not to a Turner-esque blurring, but to the older model of sharp encyclopedic delineation of ships, shoreline, and buildings, albeit with a sense of an increasing congestion that anticipated disorder even as it testified to prosperity. By turning back to an older panoramic realism, the realism of Joseph Vernet or before that of Hendrick Vroom and the Willem van de Veldes, Engels initiated a newer social realism, an art of crowded spaces, previously hidden details and the statistics of misery. In doing so, he assaulted the optimism and confidence of those earlier aristocratic and bourgeois visions of economies seen from the waterfront. The slum was for Engels what the storm was for Turner in his later paintings: a catastrophic limit set against industrial hubris. Their great difference lies in the fact that industry and the slum produce one another, while the storm remains an external force.
Fig. 2 Map of Manchester slum. From Friedrich Engels. Der Lage der Arbeitenden Klasse in England, 1845.
There was a deliberate and ironic anachronism in Engels’ choice of the sailing packet as a platform from which to launch an economic investigation of the city, underscoring capitalism’s descent from its “earlier heroic phase” to the depraved exploitation of the fully developed industrial system.10 This device contained an element of theater, a staging of a “backward” German traveller’s touristic awe at the sights, which echoes even today in insurrectionary literature.11
But ultimately Engels recognized that the port of London was in no respect anachronistically “outside” the contemporary system of production: “This great population has made London the commercial capital of the world and has created the gigantic docks in which are assembled the thousands of ships which always cover the River Thames.”12 The order of causality here is significant: the port is the product of industrial capitalism. What is absent is a developed theory of primitive accumulation, which would comprehend the prior role of the merchant ship in producing that next stage of capital ist development. If the initial iconography of Engels’ journey to London and Manchester can be traced to Amsterdam, the Dutch precedent for his opening description of the bustling scene on the Thames can be found most clearly in paintings such as Ludolph Backhuysen’s Shipping before Amsterdam (1666), or earlier in Hendrick Vroom’s Return of the Second Dutch Expedition to the West Indies (1599). These are paintings with a deck or lowermast level viewpoint from which the profile of the city of Amsterdam is partly obscured by the density of triumphant vessels in the river IJ. The standard art-historical interpretation of pictures such as these assigns a larger symbolic and anthropomorphic significance to the image of the ship:
… a ship is not an inanimate object but a complex manned entity that is rarely depicted in isolation; by its very nature it is related to a larger visible or implied whole. Not only are these ships some of the most complex products of seventeenth-century engineering, but their inherently human presence arouses our interest. Once we realize that they are pitted against the elements or against each other we become absorbed in their destiny. By implication the subject is dramatic because there must be an outcome: survival or destruction–victory or defeat.13
It is precisely this insistence on hidden allegory that Svetlana Alpers opposes in her argument that what distinguishes Dutch paintings is the intellectually complex character of their non-narrative, “descriptive” engagement with the world and conditions of visual knowing. Alpers defends a mode of pictorial absorption that is not dependent on symbolization or narrativity. But the dramaturgy of eternal struggle and “destiny,” intended to elevate marine paintings above the level of mere documents of “seventeenth-century engineering” manages to arrive unwittingly at the threshold of an interesting and sometimes embarrassing historical truth: these ships are war machines, and their purpose is bloody plunder.
It might do well for us to rethink these Dutch pictures in allegorical terms, to regard them as allegories of empire in which national identity and external threat and dominion are persistently figured by descriptive, topographic means. This requires a move from Alpers’ interest in the epistemological basis of Dutch paintings to a regard for their combative and even paranoid features. Expansive panoramic space is always haunted by the threat of collapse or counter-expansion. Thus the panorama is always implicitly or explicitly militarized: the net can close in from the other side of the horizon. For example, nowhere is the panoramic spatialization of an external threat more topographically evident than in Willem van de Velde the Elder’s The English Fleet at Anchor off Den Helder. This elongated drawing from 1653, with a vertical to horizontal ratio of 2:9, traces a densely massed line of British warships blockading the strategic gap between the island of Texel and the mainland of Holland. Here the imperium implicit in the Dutch panorama meets its mirror image. The blockade matches and implicitly “contains” the otherwise expansive view from the Dutch coast. The British antagonist is like-minded but stronger, and it is worth noting that this defeat of the Dutch “viewpoint” is reenacted in the van de Veldes’ subsequent decision to cross the horizon line and practice their craft in England.
Many Dutch maritime paintings were commissioned by city magistrates, or by shareholders in the great trading companies. One obvious condition of their success lay in the ability of the painter to articulate the economic link between the ship and the city in appropriately illusionistic and nonsymbolic spatial terms. Consider an earlier Dutch maritime painting, Hendrick Vroom’s View of Hoorn of 1622. Hoorn does not sink modestly into the sea as Dutch cities tend to do when viewed from deck level. The elevated masthead view, and the slight curvature of the coastline combine to place the city of Hoorn at the center of a global circle,
