Martina Lauster: Sketches of the Nineteenth Century: European Journals and its Physiologies, 1830-1850. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. xii + 366. Cloth £ 55.00

Contesting Walter Benjamin’s elevation of the flâneur as the archetype of modernity, and re-evaluating the genre of the feuilleton or sketch, Martina Lauster’s comprehensive comparative work examines the sketch as a literary, visual and sociological phenomenon in early nineteenth-century Europe. ‘The ambition of this study’, Lauster tells us, ‘is to present as full a picture as possible of the cognitive and epistemological qualities of the sketch industry, covering publications from three different national cultures’ (18), and in order to do this, she approaches her very broad and dispersed subject through a series of themes. Chapter 1 scrutinises the relationship between the sketch and print media, focussing on Edward Bulwer Lytton’s England and the English (1833), while chapter 2 examines that with emerging optical media, specifically the diorama and panorama, through the gaze of Dickens’s Pictures from Italy and Balzac’s contributions to Le Diable à Paris (both 1846). In chapter 3, Lauster identifies the influence of physiology and zoology on the depiction of social types in sketches, looking particularly at Balzac’s ‘L’Épicier’ and Gutzkow’s ‘Naturgeschichte der deutschen Kameele’, while chapter 4 offers an entertaining discussion of the pan-European moralist tradition in the production and subject matter of sketches.

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