Abstract

AbstractLate twentieth-century social and linguistic theory tells us that the view from the tall building transforms us into analysts and historians, disembodied readers of the civic 'text'. This paper argues that the proposition would have been familiar to seventeenth-century City-dwellers, and does so by pursuing the experience of the elevated observer, or rather, how that experience was depicted, in pictures and words. A great deal of ingenuity, as well as money, was invested in building high after the Great Fire of 1666; a decade later, the anxieties surrounding the prospect of a Catholic royal succession began to prompt some peculiarly forceful anticipations of that modern theoretical construction, the uniquely 'advantaged' spectator.