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Jay, Elisabeth. British Writers and Paris 1830–1875, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 53, Issue 3, July 2017, Pages 374–375, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqx025
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With the defeat and exile of Napoleon in 1815, France opened its borders again to the British. By 1852 there were approximately 5,000 of them living as expatriates in Paris, and a further 26,000 visitors from Britain passed through as tourists each year. As Elisabeth Jay shows in scrupulous and fascinating detail, this presence not only fuelled the writing of travel guides and fed fictional representations of Paris by the likes of Dickens and Thackeray, it also helped to sustain a lively journalistic industry of correspondents reporting to newspapers back home and English-language periodicals based in Paris itself. British Writers and Paris 1830–1875 begins by setting out the turbulent major historical and political events during the period of its survey from the July Monarchy of 1830 to the Paris Commune of 1871; material is then arranged into chapters addressing topics such as British experiences of revolution and insurgence in France, the changing topography of Paris under Napoleon III and Hausmann, and the vagaries of Parisian salon culture. This structure is a mixed blessing: although it provides clear thematic organization of complex and varied material, the repetitious historical approach seemingly inhibits the development of strong central arguments. One appeal of this book is the way that Jay turns to the works of lesser-known Victorian authors such as Catherine Gore, Henry Vizetelly and Anne Thackeray Ritchie. The prominence of women here is striking, and Jay offers very interesting evidence about the position of female newspaper correspondents in Paris, but there is no major thesis about the status of British women writers in Paris. Indeed, one of the best parts is a more sustained examination of the influence of French political cartooning upon Thackeray’s illustrations to Vanity Fair. Nevertheless, this is a significant work, one which supplements and extends previous cultural histories of Anglo-French relations by Robert and Isabel Tombs.
