John Tallis's London Street Views.

This paper offers a close examination of John Tallis's London Street Views, a series of eighty-eight street directories featuring maps and engraved topographical views of major London thoroughfares published between 1838 and 1840. One in a popular genre of London guidebooks and street directories published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, London Street Views depicts a growing and industrializing city and reflects a desire among Tallis and his contemporaries to capture London and make it somehow comprehensible. In understanding London Street Views within the cultural production of urban spaces, this paper explores the significance of urban streetscapes as highly contested sites of identity formation in early Victorian London, investigates the role that Tallis - bookseller, publisher, and Londoner - played in imagining and representing the city, and positions London Street Views within a particular urban space defined by advertising and other printed media in the early Victorian period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]