The March of Bricks and Mortar

摘要

In 1829, the great English illustrator George Cruikshank published a remarkable etching in his second collection of Scraps and Sketches. Entitled "London Going out of Town, or the March of Bricks and Mortar," the image portrays the expansion of nineteenth-century London as an invasion of the countryside by building tools, construction materials, and even entire tenement blocks that have magically come to life. Cruikshank was conveying the same anxiety over the speed and scale of early British urbanization that others were expressing in prose. In fact, the words of one of his contemporaries could have served as a caption for the image. "The rage for building," lamented the observer, "fills every pleasant outlet with bricks, mortar, rubbish and eternal scaffold-poles, which, whether you walk east, west, north, or south, seem to be running after you."