London, Hub of the Industrial Revolution: A Revisionary History.

London, Hub of the Industrial Revolution: A Revisionary History, 1775-1825. By David Barnett (London & New York, 1998. xi plus 276 pp. $59.50).

A History of London. By Stephen Inwood (New York, 1998, xxii plus 1111 pp. $38.00).

Restoration London: From Poverty to Pets, From Medicine to Magic, From Slang to Sex, From Wallpaper to Women's Rights. By Liza Picard (New York, 1997, xxi plus 330 pp. $27.50).

London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis. By Jonathan Schneer (New Haven, 1999. ix plus 336pp $29.95/cloth).

That four Londons are reviewed in this essay calls attention to the popularity of the topic, yet they represent only a few of the most recent publications. [1] Each work touches variously on the city, as its title suggests. Inwood's, a well-documented narrative, is a general up-date in accord with the latest scholarship; Barnett reinterprets the city's role in the Industrial Revolution (it did not play second-fiddle to the great Midlands' cities!); Schneer captures the aura of imperial London at the dawn of a new century, exactly a hundred years ago; finally, Picard's is a delightful vignette of Restoration life with lots of delicious anecdotes.

Although it is perhaps unfair to compare a general history with specialized ones, this reviewer readily concludes that Inwood's History is much the most impressive of the four. A highly readable work of prodigious scholarship, it covers London's history in its entirety in just over 1100 pages. Not only is its author abreast of current scholarship, he organizes his material and writes exceptionally well: the reader never wearies. The text of 937 pages is divided into six large chronological categories--"The First Thousand Years", "Medieval London", "London from the Reformation to the Great Plague", "London 1660- 1815", "Nineteenth-Century London", and "Modern London". These larger topics are, in turn, reduced to twenty-six chapters and an introduction, each of varying length. Twelve range from ten to thirty pages, eight between thirty and fifty, and seven between fifty and seventy. Only two, however, exceed sixty. Each chapter is reduced to approximately twenty topics, averaging one to three pages each.

While such analysis hardly speaks to the substance of the work, it does emphasize the care which has gone into its organization. The fifty plus page chapter, "The Richest City in the World", contains twenty sub-headings which treat topics such as manufacturing, worker routine, industry in south London, shipbuilding, the Lea Valley, docks and dockers, City banks, stock exchange, financing world trade, insurance, the Prudential, and millionaires and clerks--each in the context of nineteenth-century London.

"Transport and Suburban Growth" carries with it a less conventional theme in its fifty pages with nineteen sub-headings. In this chapter the author examines such matters as Regency improvements, new roads, omnibuses and early trains, underground and suburban railways, the Metropolitan Board and the London County Council as road builders, origins of the electric tube, and motor buses and electric trains. Inwood concludes this with a particularly good account of the suburban impulse--the spread of suburbs, developers, a new West End, suburban poverty, Hamstead and Finchley, north London, Lambeth and Camberwell, and the quality of suburban life.

Regarding wartime London, "Under Fire, 1939-1945" is contained in some forty pages and eighteen sub-headings, which range from a consideration of the mood of the people to an account of air raids, evacuees, shelters, homeless and hardship, rocket attacks, London's losses, and the impact of war. Obviously, such a cursory review of the contents of three chapters does not adequately convey either the quality or the substance of the work at large; it does, however, suggest the work's inclusiveness. The short sections into which each chapter is divided enhance readability of such a large volume quite as much as the author's graceful style. Although I have selected these chapters more or less at random, they nicely exemplify the manner in which the author has structured the work and how he has incorporated an abundance of helpful detail despite its being a general history.

If L. D. Schwarz in the early 1990s did not completely dispel the notion that London was bypassed by the Industrial Revolution, Barnett's work leaves no such doubts in his readers' minds. Its thesis is that in the half century between 1875 and 1825 London became the world's greatest city--in population, commerce, and, especially, industry. Barnett yields not an inch to the Midlands as he cites the momentous accomplishments of industrial London. Introducing his work by defining the metropolis and describing the city's industrial structure, he examines more than a dozen manufacturing trades and, especially, the construction trades--all in the larger context of the consumer revolution and the city's service and commercial economy. Barnett is convincing in arguing that industry contributed a notable share in making early nineteenth-century London "the world's first modem city".

Barnett's proposition that London was "hub" of the Industrial Revolution rests on hard data, particularly that which he gleaned from Guildhall fire office registers. These were principally registers of the Sun Fire Office as buttressed by information from the city's trade directories. He concedes that London was significantly more multi-faceted than other European capital cities. Its financial, commercial, and transport infrastructure and the diversity of its trades gave it a unique opportunity to seize economic leadership at a crucial moment. The emerging London of 1825 became a kind of prototype for the twentieth-century city, something that cannot be said of any other urban center in the world of 1825. Barnett's book is plausible, even compelling. While well written, organized, and documented, it is not so engrossing as Inwood: Bamett incessantly (but sometimes tiresomely) hammers home his point. He and Inwood are in agreement in their assessment of London's role in the Industrial Revolution, especially r especting the city's manufacturing prowess; moreover, in a striking way Barnett's London foreshadows Schneer's late Victorian city.

Regarding Schneer's work, this reader's first reaction was one of trepidation: is this author resorting to gimmickry of sorts by playing to end-of-the-century and millennium hype--the kind to which we are daily exposed in recapitulations of the twentieth century and prospects for the new? Although his recounting of modern London's celebratory moments--the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Festival of Britain a century later, and now the Millennium Dome in Greenwich--indicates that he appreciates the appropriateness of the present moment for his publication, there is more here, much more, than opportunism.

That London was great in 1900, great as a city and great because it was the center of empire, there can be no doubt. No other European metropolis could make such claims. As the author states, London in 1900 represented "the intersection of urban life and imperialism at a particular moment, when both the city and empire of which it was the capital were at their zenith" (pp. 12-13). It was, indeed, a magical moment to savor. The author further explains his intent: "the book seeks to explain an interactive process which defined what it meant at the turn of the twentieth century for London to be the world's imperial metropolis" (p. 13).

It might be supposed that the most effective means to relate imperialism to London in 1900 is through its monuments honoring dead heroes. True, they were and still are there in abundance. In "The Face of Imperial London" Schneer describes them, but he does more. In "The Nexus of Empire" and "The City" the author treats those two sectors of London that most epitomized the imperial capital--the Docklands and the financial center--which were more consequential than statues of generals and admirals adorning grand plazas.

All this said, the chief merit of Schneer's work is his means of unraveling the mystery of imperial London and its people. He describes vividly the return of the City Imperial Volunteers (CIV) from the Boer War, stevedores at the docks, Ben Tillett haranguing striking dockers, the financial manipulations of such City men as Edwin Arthur Cade and John Daw, celebrities of popular culture, activist women, the city's radicals, and the resident coterie of Indians and Africans who sounded dissent to the ringing approval that imperialism was generally accorded. In all, it is a lively group, especially the ladies--Lady Dorothy Nevill, Lady Londonderry, Flora Shaw, and Mary Kingsley--each of whom exemplified the ingenuity of Victorian womankind, political and legal disabilities notwithstanding.

At a time when we count human freedom a notable legacy of the twentieth century, it is particularly poignant to regard those imperial capital residents who clamored for it at the dawn of that century. That they did so in the very lair of the practitioners and apologists for exploitation gives the story special resonance. This recounting of the nascent undermining of the culture of imperialism provides a further perspective to the transformation of Asia and Africa after World War II. What marvelous irony that such reaction should have originated in London, the heart and soul of imperialism!

Whether Schneer uses imperialism as a means of revealing London or London as a vehicle for de-mystifying imperialism makes no great difference: one of the most important themes in modern history--whether European or Third World--was intimately and inescapably connected to this world city of 1900. The author's cogent observations further remind us that the city which many of us remember during the World War II and its aftermath a half century ago was not all that much removed from the metropolis of 1900.

It can be said right off that Liza Picard's Restoration London is no match in a scholarly sense for any of the three previously reviewed books; still, it is assuredly the most entertaining or in some instances horrifying. By combing Restoration printed material--diaries, newspapers, almanacs, and much else--she has produced a panoramic but not always pretty portrait of Restoration society. Her graphic accounts include "the casual excretory habits of the courtiers" and Samuel Pepys' consternation when the night-soil men "slopped their way through [his] house" to recover a neighbor's waste which had backed up through his own cess-pit.

The book consists of seventeen chapters, most of which are subdivided into a half dozen or so topics. Among others, they include such topics as houses, interiors, gardens, communications, medicine, clothes, housework, cooking, sex, the household, education, hobbies, the law, money, and religion. What the book lacks in profundity, it more than compensates for in its uncommon information, humor, and shock effect. Picard has mined her sources well and in so doing has produced an intriguing portrait of an age. While hers is a treatment that differs markedly from that of Inwood, the two meld rather well. Inwood's examination of the mortality rise, drinking water, and slum living provide a larger context for the matters which Picard describes so colorfully. Those who lecture on Restoration history and literature will discover useful tidbits guaranteed to enliven a sleepy class.

Inwood contains about a hundred pages of notes and bibliography, more than twenty pages of maps and notes, sixty-six illustrations, and, finally, an extraordinary index of another fifty pages. These aids make it an ideal reference. Barnett, too, is well-documented, containing notes, bibliography, charts, and a short, but adequate, index. Schneer's is excellently documented with notes, bibliography, and index. The illustrations are exceptional and appropriately placed throughout the book. Picard cites her sources in endnotes but does not include a bibliography as such. Of the approximately forty illustrations which appear in three clusters, some are quite novel.

That London history today is enjoying a renaissance of sorts speaks well for the city's continued resilience as well as its mystique. Each work reviewed here makes its special contribution to both.

ENDNOTE 

(1.) Others published in this decade include Celina Fox, ed., London-World City 1800-1840 (New Haven, 1992); M.H. Port, Imperial London: Civil Government Building in London 1851-1915 (New Haven, 1995); Roy Porter, London: A Social History (Cambridge, 1994); L.D. Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialization: Entrepreneurs, Labour Force and Living Conditions, 1700-1850 (Cambridge, 1992); and F. H. W. Sheppard, London: A History (1998) and The Treasury of London's Past: An Historical Account of the Museum of London and Its Predecessors, the Guildhall Museum and the London Museum (1991).

See also F. J. Fisher, "London as an Engine of Economic Growth," in London and the English Economy, 1500-1700, ed. P. J. Corfield and N.B. Harte (London, 1990). The city's history has even been the subject of a novel by Edward Rutherfurd (London: [New York, 1997]). A good up-date of a period in London history, articles as well as books, may be found in the bibliography of Charles Harvey, Edmund M. Green, and Penelope J. Corfield, "Continuity, Change, and Specialization within Metropolitan London: the Economy of Westminster, 1750-1 820", Economic History Review, LII, 3 (1999): 469-93.