Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867; 'More than Mere Amusement': Working-class Women's Leisure in England, 1750-1914; The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London.

Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867. By Catherine Hall (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002. xviii + 556 pp. cloth, $50.00 paper $29.00).

'More than Mere Amusement': Working-class Women's Leisure in England, 1750-1914. By Catriona M. Parratt (Boston, Mass.: Northeastern University Press, 2001. x + 294 pp.).

The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London. By Anthony S. Wohl (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2002. xxv + 386 pp. paper $34.95).

In contrasting but overlapping ways, two of the three books under review draw attention to key preoccupations among British social and cultural historians at the turn of the millennium. The third is a reprint of a classic work first published in 1977. It is certainly very useful to have Wohl's The Eternal Slum in print again, and one bookselling website confirms this by pricing the new edition twenty dollars cheaper than a second-hand copy; but author and publishers, in whatever combination, have missed an opportunity. This is a pioneering study, based on very thorough archival research, of the housing problem in Victorian London. Its focus is on the reconstruction of social conditions, on the economic circumstances that gave rise to them, and on the role of charity, local government and the state in seeking to ameliorate them, bringing out the enduring tensions between laissez-faire assumptions, moral outrage and practical necessity. This is a splendid example of an excellent piece of social history with a compelling set of contemporary messages (more so in the England of 2002 than that of 1977, after the ruinous interlude of the Thatcher and Major years). But it has been reissued exactly as originally published. No account has been taken of the array of studies that appeared in its wake, extending the agenda and developing these and cognate fields. It would have been fascinating to read Wohl's reflections on this rich historiography, commenting on (for example) the overviews of housing history by Daunton and Rodger, the great panoramic London histories by Sheppard, Inwood and (especially) Roy Porter, Olsen on the building of Victorian London, Muthesius on the terraced house, J.A. Yelling on slum clearance, Jennifer Davis and Jerry White (among others) on particular 'slum' districts, Martin Gaskell and Alan Mayne on the concept of the slum, Bill Luckin and others on the Thames, Peter Brimblecombe on atmospheric pollution (along with the rise of urban environmental history more generally), Ellen Ross and Anna Davin on women's family and working lives, children and survival strategies, or Judith Walkowitz and Lynda Nead on the gendered perils and pleasures of the Victorian metropolis. Many other names might be added, and we must not forget Wohl's own successor volume, Endangered lives, with its focus on public health in London; but there is not even an updated bibliography. Wohl's reflections on these themes would have set his own great book in context, communicating a sense of how things had moved on and where they might go next. Without such an enhancement, this is just another reprint.

This roll-call of work on Wohl-related themes over the last quarter-century helps to provide a context for the two new books. Wohl's main concerns can be summarised as social pathology, public health and political intervention (local and national) in Victorian England. These themes are still with us, but they tend to be tackled from angles that were only just becoming available in the late 1970s: gender, leisure and sport being among the most prominent. Catriona Parratt's book is a case in point. Her survey of working-class women and leisure in England during the 'long' industrial revolution moves clearly and sensibly into a yawning gap in the existing literature. Its timeliness is underlined by the way in which it meets Claire Langhamer's Women's leisure in England 1920-1960 (Manchester, 2000) end-on, although the latter book is organised around the life cycle rather than social structure. Jeffrey Hill's recent survey, Sport, leisure and culture in twentieth-century Britain (London and New York, 2002), also incorporates gender issues into its argument more systematically than has hitherto been the norm. Parratt develops the gender dimension to a well-established historiography, which is focused on questions of 'free time' (a particularly vexed issue here), respectability, transgression, commercialisation and the provision and reception of 'rational recreations'. This is also where the intersection with and extension of an older historiography of public health and moral improvement through education and leisure are most noticeable. The most sustained use of original archival material comes in the two chapters that deal with the latter theme, and archival research across several repositories in the English Midland makes less of an impact on the text than might have been expected. This is at times a rather literal-minded book, prone to over-simplification and even distortion when it ventures into (for example) Chartism, wages and working conditions, missing out on or under-using one or two important books (particularly Lyn Munqn's Popular leisure in the Lake Counties), and taking a few liberties with English place-names (the worst of which locates the Mendip Hills in Cheshire instead of Somerset, two hundred miles to the south). The text is also haunted by an absence, that of Pierre Bourdieu. But this is nevertheless a valuable contribution to a range of linked literatures, not excluding the work of Wohl.

Wohl's portrayal of London as 'the metropolis of slums' as well as that of empire has much more to say about class, and especially the relationship between the 'respectable' working classes and the 'residuum', than about gender, which (in keeping with the predominant academic discourses of the time) is almost invisible. Parratt's central focus on it reflects one of the historiographical sea-changes of the last quarter-century. Hall's important book goes further: it is always aware of class, 'respectability' and the making of policy as central concerns of the social historian, even one who has followed the 'turn to culture' and pays respectful heed to aspects of post-modernism, but the triple pillars that bear the main weight of its argument are gender, race/ethnicity and empire. At great (and perhaps self-indulgent) length and with copious quotation, Hall examines the relationship between metropole and colony through the missionaries (especially Baptists) who sought to evangelise Jamaica (and especially its black and coloured populations) during the middle decades of the nineteenth century; the close connections between these activities and the campaigns against slavery (and against what at times seemed the real possibility of its return); the ways in which the Baptists' efforts were hampered by inflexible notions of what constituted proper Christian behaviour (based on the respectable patriarchal lower middle-class family); and the political context for their activities in Jamaica, London and Birmingham, a case-study of which forms the final section of the book. Colonial government is given due attention, both in relation to the dominant white planter class in Jamaica and to the role of the colonial governor, culminating in the furious controversy that erupted over Governor Eyre's deployment of indiscriminate and illegal violence in the aftermath of riots at Morant Bay in the mid-1860s. There is much rich material here, and the book constitutes a further reminder of the importance not only of seeing the British Empire as a whole, but also of providing due and compensatory evidence for the view from the 'periphery'. When reading this impressive analysis, however, it is easy to forget some of the ties that should bind this historiography to earlier ones. The closeness of the parallels between the condescending, fearful and uncomprehending perceptions of a black collective personality that so impaired the understanding even of the most sympathetic of the missionaries and their allies, and the ways in which similar language was deployed (with only the physical descriptions differing) to stigmatise the English (as well as Irish and Jewish) 'residuum' of the slums, should give more pause for thought about the most important ingredients in the construction of 'otherness' in this period; and this brings us back to Wohl's 'eternal slum', the prospects for reforming it and its inhabitants, and the question of agency and choice in the adopted or imposed lifestyles of slum dwellers. The parallels here need closer investigation than Hall's book provides, although hers is another, if related, agenda. What is clear is that, across a generation, there are more links among the agendas of these seemingly disparate books than might appear at first sight.

John K. Walton

University of Central Lancashire