"City of Light"

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>Here's an 1876 citation from Appleton's (MOA/umich version):
>
>THE writer of an article in a recent Saturday Review on Victor Hugo's "
>Pendant l'Exil" amuses himself with "taking off" M. Hugo's style. Here is
>a paragraph: " There are some wonderful pages about Paris toward the close
>of the introductory chapter. Paris, he says, is the frontier of the
>future, the visible frontier of the unknown, all the quantity of To-morrow
>which may be visible in To-day. Whoso seeks for progress with his eyes
>shall behold Paris. There are black cities; Paris is the City of Light. It
>is impossible to get out of Paris; for every living man, though he knoweth
>it not, hath Paris in the depths of his being.
>
>Also, there's one in an 1871 play by Robert Williams Buchanan, _The Drama
>of Kings_, spoken by Napoleon:
>"But what of Paris?  What of the city of light?"
>
>Did Edison's lights come in around 1879 or so? There are many earlier
>references to a City of Light (not Paris) where the reference is
>religious.  Is it biblical?
>My guess would be that it went from an original religious reference (i.e.,
>heaven as the city of light) to something in line with the citation from
>1847 where light = learning, enlightenment, etc. and maybe later to a more
>literal sense of light(s). But it seems the sobriquet for Paris predated
>the lightbulb sense (if I've got my dates right).

Any metropolis will be a "city of light" (in the evening) to the bumpkin
from the boonies, I suppose: no doubt Babylon amazed its visitors long ago
with its torches or lamps.

Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" referred to a City of Light or so, didn't it?

As for "Ville Lumie`re" = "Paris", here is an apparent memoir by Lord
Frederick Hamilton ("The Days Before Yesterday", 1921 [I think]) (Project
Gutenberg):

----------

    The London of the "sixties" was a very dark and dingy place. The
streets were sparingly lit with the dimmest of gas-jets set very far apart:
the shop-windows made no display of lights, and the general effect was one
of intense gloom.
    Until I was seven years old, I had never left the United Kingdom. We
then all went to Paris for a fortnight, on our way to the Riviera. I well
remember leaving London at 7 a.m. on a January morning, in the densest of
fogs. So thick was the fog that the footman had to lead the horses all the
way to Charing Cross Station. Ten hours later I found myself in a fairy
city of clean white stone houses, literally blazing with light. I had never
imagined such a beautiful, attractive place, and indeed the contrast
between the dismal London of the "sixties" and this brilliant, glittering
town was unbelievable. Paris certainly deserved the title of "La Ville
Lumiere" in a literal sense. I like the French expression, "une ville
ruisselante de lumiere," "a city dripping with light." That is an apt
description of the Paris of the Second Empire, for it was hardly a
manufacturing city then, and the great rim of outlying factories that now
besmirch the white stone of its house fronts had not come into existence,
the atmosphere being as clear as in the country.

----------

This is 1860's, apparently, as remembered much later.

The electric lights would have appeared in public places right around 1880,
I think. But before that of course there were gas street-lights, etc.

-- Doug Wilson