Bloody Sundays

Abstract

Abstract During the 1880s Trafalgar Square became a popular site for political protests and occupations, but few matched the scale and violence of 13 November 1887, as the subjects of this chapter attest. Writers, artists, and activists all, Margaret Harkness, Annie Besant, Walter Crane, and William Morris, crafted their first-hand experience of Bloody Sunday into literary and visual forms that parsed the official nomenclature of the riot as an act of wilful misreading and specious naming. Swept up in the riot itself, they were exposed to the literal risks of political action and violent suppression orchestrated by the state’s nominative force. None were left in any doubt that the reading of the Riot Act was explicitly used to reverse the perceived direction of the violence and legitimate the measures taken to restore the peace. What emerges from their work is a retrospective imagining of the riot as a complex event, a collective interpretive process that is intentionally redistributive and aesthetic. Abstracting from their immediate affective experience of the violence, each writer/artist enlists a different genre or medium—autobiography, the ballad, utopian, realist fiction, illustration—to reconfigure the riot’s seemingly chaotic formlessness into narrative and poetic sequences that challenge the rhetoric of irrational spontaneity that characterized contemporary media accounts which sensationally named the events of that day, Bloody Sunday.

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