Cobb's Ixelles a Quarter Century On
Philip Mosley is Professor of English, Communications, and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University and was Fulbright visiting professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, 2003–04.
Correspondence: jpm11{at}email.psu.edu
Richard Cobb was Professor of Modern History at Oxford from 1973 to 1984. In July and August 1978 the Listener published Cobb's two talks on the commune of Ixelles, one of nineteen such municipalities comprising the metropolis of Brussels. ‘Within the Limits of Ixelles’ and to ‘The Lost Milieu of Ixelles’, elegies to a place Cobb had first visited during World War Two, were part of ‘Fiction, Fact, and France’, his series of thirteen talks about novelists and places broadcast on Radio 3. Their elegiac mood allows for a meditation on the workings and transformations of our sense of place.
To Cobb's view of Ixelles in these earlier periods I add my own view based on a recent half-year stay as a visiting professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. I suspect that Cobb, whose entire oeuvre sought to give history back to les petites gens, would have appreciated the continuing presence in Ixelles of a subculture now composed mainly of immigrants, artists, and students. I suspect too he would have viewed this multiculturalism as a welcome if not wholly adequate replacement for that irreverent, self-sufficient community of native artisans and marginaux which he respected so deeply and whose disappearance he described so eloquently on his return there more than twenty-five years ago.
In this new occasional feature History Workshop Journal will be publishing informal historical reflections in dialogue with or located in the physical environment of the past. ‘Streets’ is not to be taken too literally. Writing that deals with any built spaces or physical geography will be welcome, as long as the sense of space itself is at its heart. The first of our two inaugural essays is Philip Mosley's retrospective of Richard Cobb, situated in a Belgian stamping-ground of this pioneer of historical urban sensibility. In the second, Jeffrey Wasserstrom links St Louis (Missouri) and Shanghai in his reanimation of the life of a lesser-known figure, the American author Emily Hahn.