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A monster of desire at the heart of a nation
Frances Wilson
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 14/01/2007



Frances Wilson reviews London in the 19th Century by Jerry White

According to Dr Johnson, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." For those who can't afford all the life London has to offer, there is Jerry White's encyclopaedic new book instead (at £20, the cost of five Tube tickets) – I guarantee you will never tire of this. London in the 19th Century, like White's previous London in the 20th Century, is as rich as a fruit cake, as layered as an onion, and as complex as the capital itself.

The social history of London in the 19th century can be summarised as "the story of the search for order", and the heart of White's concern with city life is the struggle for authority between the powers and the people: "Just how – and how far – Londoners were brought to heal must be a central strand in any history of London in the 19th century." As such, one fifth of London in the 19th Century is given to the growth of law and order; how the arranged marriage of Church and state evangelised the Georgian mob and spawned a haven of happy homes and hearths.

advertisementBut the story of 19th century London is also the story of the birth of speed, and not only because of the velocity with which a great old city was to become the greatest new city the world had ever seen. It was during this time that daily life itself picked up pace and began to steam ahead. The century oversaw the construction of the main arteries of the metropolis, the railway lines that now shoot out from all sides like tentacles, the roads that spiral from the city's centre into a new suburbia, the sewers and tubes rumbling beneath, the sanitisation of the river and the birth of the embankment.

These arteries belonged to an increasingly Herculean body – and, like all bodies, this one harboured and hid a less civilised life within, which continually threatened to take over. "London," as White puts it, "was a monster of desire." Tales of crime and prostitution in Victorian England are wheeled out to entertain us on a regular basis, and it is to White's credit that when he arrives at that wearisome point where a mention of Jack the Ripper is required, he leaves aside the usual speculation to commemorate instead only the names of the five women who were slain.

At one point mid-century, the police believed that up to 8,000 women were working the streets, while the evangelists put the figure at nearer 80,000. Aas to the demand which produced the industry, "Here London was unique in every way. It was the greatest and richest gathering of men on earth and for much of their daily lives they were without women's company." Hundreds and thousands of men came to London for work, be it in the banks or the fish markets; sailors landed in the port from all over the globe, the railways and steamboats disgorged migrants by the day.

A micro-history of the city is contained in many of her most characterful streets: the New Road, now Oxford Street, down which condemned men would travel to meet their maker at Tyburn; Wentworth Street, the "Jew's market"; Lombard Street, "the golden heart which kept world trade in circulation"; New Cut, the "mercanatile Pandemonium" of South London; Fleet Street, "the street of ink"; Granby Street, "one of the most notorious patches of vice in London"; Flower and Dean Streets, "associated in most people's minds with vice, immorality, and crime in their most hideous shapes"; and Bow Street, "the office celebrated all over the United Kingdom, and it may be said the whole world, for its execution of the police".

It was the best of times and the worst of times. A period of stunning progress, the century saw the construction of most of our museums, galleries, churches, hospitals, schools, theatres, and parks. But there were also staggering failures. White relates a history not of rags to riches but of riches to more riches, during which the rags stayed in roughly the same state. The great stain on the age was its failure to find a solution to the problem of poverty. "Here lay the roots of incivility and brutality and stunted opportunity, persisting among a minority of Londoners, that daily undermined the rhetoric of progress."

Jerry White is to London as Boswell is to Johnson; the strength of this book lies not only in his infectious admiration for his subject but in his combination of modesty with unerring authority. London in the 19th Century should sit on your shelf alongside Debrett's, the Oxford dictionary, and your complete set of Dickens.

[This looks like an excellent item.]

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