Good as her Word: Selected Journalism. Lorna Sage

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       Flora by gaslight

      The London Journal of Flora Tristan TRANSLATED, ANNOTATED AND INTRODUCED BY JEAN HAWKES

      FLORA TRISTAN’S INTEREST AS an investigator of nineteenth-century London starts with the fact that she is so un-English – so utterly immune, that is, to the atmosphere of decorum and common sense that covered the English public women of her time like a veil.

      It’s not just that she is French, or at least it’s more complicated than that: her parents were a French émigrée and a Peruvian grandee; she was dubiously legitimate and certainly disinherited; her own marriage failed, and when, after a battle for the children, she won a court separation, her husband shot her in the back and got 20 years – all of which she rushed into print, along with an account of her voyage to Peru to claim kin. Unsuccessfully – hence her hand-to-mouth career as a wandering socialist prophet, and hence the London Journal, based on her visits in the 1820s and 1830s. She was also Gauguin’s grandmother, as the most recent biography (C. N. Gattey’s Gauguin’s Astonishing Grandmother) chauvinistically announces.

      However, here she is in her own right, in a new translation by Jean Hawkes, who admits to removing some exclamation marks and dashes, but has otherwise splendidly preserved an original collage of romance, realism, high feeling and visionary prejudice.

      We start from the Port of London, bamboozled by sheer size – the world’s biggest city – and mesmerized by the glamour of gaslight; but within a couple of pages we adjust to the English pace: it’s nearly impossible to get from A to B, which is why people are so churlish and weary, not to mention the climate, which is what drives them to drink … In short, Londoners are glum, snobbish, sycophantic, inhospitable, punctual (very sinister this, since journeys take hours) and appallingly conventional:

      If a daguerreotype were made of the public in Regent Street or Hyde Park it would be remarkable for the same artificial expressions and submissive demeanour that characterise the crude figures in Chinese painting.

      Flora, on the other hand, is a woman of spirit, labouring under the burden of reporting British Podsnappery for the sake of posterity (England is the shape of things to come, if we’re not careful). She is also very French, and blissfully unaware of it – ‘Thank God I long ago renounced any notion of nationality, a mean and narrow concept.’ She also doesn’t exactly believe in God (a mean and narrow concept).

      ‘Beer and gas are the two main products consumed in London.’ Can it have been true? Could it be still? The link between debauchery and drunkenness is obvious: ‘The sober Englishman is chaste to the point of prudery.’ But other equally incautious remarks give one pause – on the connection between Protestantism, free enterprise and insanity, for instance, or on religious education (‘in the Bible criminals can find good reason for persisting in their life of crime’). And if she’s altogether of her time when she visits prisons looking out for criminal physiognomy and ‘bumps,’ she soars into wilder regions when she confesses: ‘I see prostitution as either an appalling madness or an act so sublime that my mortal understanding cannot comprehend it.’ Her section on the need for infant schools from the age of two, on the other hand, is so prosaic, sane and obvious, it quite takes one’s breath away in our neo-Victorian age.

      Volatile as she is, however (she is inconsistent on principle), it’s not hard to see how she reads England. Its commercial supremacy is founded on India (sharp of her in the 1830s?). It abolished the Slave Trade to prevent other countries founding colonies, and has proletarianised the West Indian Negroes, who are now almost as wretched as the English working class. London itself – the final exposure of British ‘humanitarianism’ – is a slave market, where young children (of both sexes, she observed coolly) are sold for prostitution. England is imperialist, materialist, masculine. Hope lies with the Chartists and the women, then, logically enough.

      Her account of a Chartist meeting is in deliberate contrast with her visit to Parliament (squalid boredom, quite apart from the fact that she had to disguise herself as a Turk to get in). The Chartist delegates are alive, eager, visionary, and hopeful – ‘You can see that the poor boy believes in God, in Woman, in self-sacrifice’ – as are the women writers, though perhaps they write because their lives are so socially null:

      In France, and any country which prides itself on being civilised, the most honoured of living creatures is woman. In England it is the horse …

      Her profundities and inanities alike spring from the weird acuteness of the angle at which she approaches England. Who (except a Sterne) would have a chapter on pockets? Or report on a mud-splashing service for huntsmen too poor to hunt? Now there’s an idea for a small business. You never know, though, with this wild lady, when she’ll turn out to be timely. A final thought for the day:

      Oh! The railways, the railways! In them I see the means whereby every base attempt to prevent the growth of union and brotherhood will be utterly confounded.