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The growth of Victorian London
304
REVIEWS
DONALDJ. OLSEN,The Growth of Victorian London (London: &10*50)
Batsford, 1976. Pp. 384.
London has always had a bad press, but Victorian London has been attacked and reviled without remission from the day Queen Victoria ascended the throne. In 18.56,the Saturday Review described London as “the least beautiful city in the world”. In Thomas Carlyle’s opinion, metropolitan house design reached a nadir in mid-Victorian times. “Who shall express how detestable it is, how frightful”, he cried. At the end of the reign, Charles Booth saw the mean streets of Pimlico as “a nightmare in the memory”, while William Morris, casting his eye over a vast sprawl of suburbs, grieved at “the ugliness which surrounds our lives”. Since Queen Victoria died, few have come to defend Victorian London, let alone admire it. Newspapers and television continue to caricature it through sordid scenes from the Illustrated London News, and they continue to reproduce images fashioned by George Cruickshank and Gustave DorC of grimy and mis-shapen buildings, presided over by priggish and mercenary nineteenth-century patriarchs and inhabited by downtrodden families living in abject misery. While Londoners have not ceased to complain about their Victorian heritage, increasing numbers of visitors are attracted by the variety and distinctiveness of the exteriors of nineteenth-century buildings, as well as by the comfort of their interiors. With the exception of the Tower, Westminster Abbey, St James’s Palace, St Paul’s Cathedral and a few monuments of Georgian architecture, Victorians created all the most famous and best-loved landmarks in the capital. Victorian architects designed Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, Tower Bridge, the facade of Buckingham Palace, Piccadilly Circus, the Law Courts and the Albert Hall. They constructed the Victoria Embankment, laid out broad shopping streets and largely rebuilt the City of London. Any other age would be applauded for inventing London’s railway termini, would be thanked for furnishing the capital with splendid museums, art galleries and academies, would be praised for filling the West End with dignified clubs, spacious theatres, luxurious hotels, comfortable restaurants and opulent department stores. Strenuous efforts would be made to preserve churches, banks, wholesale markets and taverns built in earlier periods, but these, together with the finest examples of Victorian engineering-gasworks, waterworks, public baths-are now wantonly destroyed. The Victorians endowed London with bigger and better prisons, hospitals and schools. They opened new public gardens, converted metropolitan commons into parks and recreation grounds, designed new cemeteries and planned innumerable gardenesque suburbs. The present generation owes the Victorians at least as much for the work they did behind the scenes as for the showplaces at the centre of the capital. An American historian, Donald Olsen, has set out to rescue Victorian planners and builders from obscurity or ignominy and has attempted to reassess their achievements. His study focuses in greater detail upon city centre developments and urban renewal than, as the title suggests, upon the growth of residential suburbs. It examines the parts played by landlords, building contractors and public authorities in changing the face of London during the nineteenth century. Public and private improvement schemes provided nowhere for the poor to live. A labourer and his family could not afford to rent the lowest class of house permitted by the Building Acts. Poor families crowded into decaying tenements vacated by the better-off. The poorest were driven from slum to slum until they could go nowhere but to hostels for down-and-outs or to the workhouse. As rookeries were pulled down and back streets were taken over by shops and offices, older neighbourhoods that were once socially mixed gave way to socially segregated and economically specialized quarters. For the not-so-poor, new doors opened. Museums and libraries made art and literature freely available to all, music halls offered cheap entertainment, railway companies organized excursions to the seaside, and a multitude of shops displayed an enormous profusion of mass-produced goods. Victorian enterprise transformed London into a raucous, competitive, vulgar emporium for an emerging consumer society. The city was cruel to the poor, but exciting for those able to escape from the poverty trap.
REVIEWS
305
During Queen Victoria’s reign, the population of London increased from under two millions to over four and a half millions and the central business district encroached more deeply into older residential areas. The working classes pressed more closely into manufacturing quarters, huddled alongside railway tracks and occupied low ground among the docks. The middle classes moved further afield towards fresh air and sunshine, in search of social separateness and domestic seclusion. On the outskirts of town, they created abodes of genteel cosiness and make-believe rusticity. Neither pub, nor church nor shop would draw them away from their homes and gardens. The railway station alone beckoned its passengers for their daily journeys to work. The inter-related searches for employment and for accommodation, the links between workplace and residence, the geographies of extending lines of transportation and suburban expansion are not explored in this book. Olsen discusses in detail the development of the Eton College Chalcots estate between Chalk Farm and Swiss Cottage, but he says little about house building in Bermondsey, Balham, Willesden or Hackney. The changing location of manufacturing and the spread of communications networks receive less attention than changes in estate planning, house design and class consciousness. This detailed examination of the history of residential segregation raises many questions for historical geographers which can only be answered by studying individuals and by learning about their families, their wealth, their occupations, their social affiliations and their tastes. Olsen has assessed the magnitude of the debt owed by present-day Londoners to their Victorian predecessors for making parts of the metropolis comfortable and agreeable places in which to live and work. On this solid foundation, future workers may build with confidence. University College London
HUGH PRINCE
WILLIAMN. PARKERand ERIC L. JONES(Eds), European Peasants and their Markets: Essays in Agrarian Economic History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. Pp. viii + 366. fl3.40) The scattering of parcels of land throughout the open fields of a township, the development of communal control of limited agricultural resources, the emergence of societies offering insurance against losses of standing crops in hailstorms, the adoption of food bottling and canning-such features permit a group of North American economists to view the history of European agriculture essentially in terms of the practice of risk minimization by farming communities. In sum, this collection of essays turns the dazzling spotlight of economic theory upon particular acts in the historical spectacle of European agriculture. Old friends look different-some better, some worse-when viewed in this new light. Practising what they preach, the editors minimize the risk of adverse criticism by choosing a diversified portfolio of eight contributions which embrace both general and particular studies, syntheses as well as analyses of aspects of European farming in a variety of periods and places. An introductory apologia by Parker includes a tantalizing glimpse of the development of European agriculture through Malthusian, Smithian and Schumpeterian phases, argues that farmers tried to remove uncertainties from their activities by estimating probabilities of success and by devices to spread risk, but also disarmingly admits that a variety of non-economic factors operated, thereby limiting “wholly rational explanation” of agricultural history. Nonetheless, an ambitious survey by Hoffmann of medieval field systems concludes that common fields originated “as a conservative and equilibrium-maintaining response by a group whose outlook and experience easily and not irrationally guided them in that direction”. An elegantly theoretical justification in economic terms of Marc Bloch’s contention that parcels were scattered throughout open fields in order to spread the risks of crop damage and failure is
REVIEWS
DONALDJ. OLSEN,The Growth of Victorian London (London: &10*50)
Batsford, 1976. Pp. 384.
London has always had a bad press, but Victorian London has been attacked and reviled without remission from the day Queen Victoria ascended the throne. In 18.56,the Saturday Review described London as “the least beautiful city in the world”. In Thomas Carlyle’s opinion, metropolitan house design reached a nadir in mid-Victorian times. “Who shall express how detestable it is, how frightful”, he cried. At the end of the reign, Charles Booth saw the mean streets of Pimlico as “a nightmare in the memory”, while William Morris, casting his eye over a vast sprawl of suburbs, grieved at “the ugliness which surrounds our lives”. Since Queen Victoria died, few have come to defend Victorian London, let alone admire it. Newspapers and television continue to caricature it through sordid scenes from the Illustrated London News, and they continue to reproduce images fashioned by George Cruickshank and Gustave DorC of grimy and mis-shapen buildings, presided over by priggish and mercenary nineteenth-century patriarchs and inhabited by downtrodden families living in abject misery. While Londoners have not ceased to complain about their Victorian heritage, increasing numbers of visitors are attracted by the variety and distinctiveness of the exteriors of nineteenth-century buildings, as well as by the comfort of their interiors. With the exception of the Tower, Westminster Abbey, St James’s Palace, St Paul’s Cathedral and a few monuments of Georgian architecture, Victorians created all the most famous and best-loved landmarks in the capital. Victorian architects designed Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, Tower Bridge, the facade of Buckingham Palace, Piccadilly Circus, the Law Courts and the Albert Hall. They constructed the Victoria Embankment, laid out broad shopping streets and largely rebuilt the City of London. Any other age would be applauded for inventing London’s railway termini, would be thanked for furnishing the capital with splendid museums, art galleries and academies, would be praised for filling the West End with dignified clubs, spacious theatres, luxurious hotels, comfortable restaurants and opulent department stores. Strenuous efforts would be made to preserve churches, banks, wholesale markets and taverns built in earlier periods, but these, together with the finest examples of Victorian engineering-gasworks, waterworks, public baths-are now wantonly destroyed. The Victorians endowed London with bigger and better prisons, hospitals and schools. They opened new public gardens, converted metropolitan commons into parks and recreation grounds, designed new cemeteries and planned innumerable gardenesque suburbs. The present generation owes the Victorians at least as much for the work they did behind the scenes as for the showplaces at the centre of the capital. An American historian, Donald Olsen, has set out to rescue Victorian planners and builders from obscurity or ignominy and has attempted to reassess their achievements. His study focuses in greater detail upon city centre developments and urban renewal than, as the title suggests, upon the growth of residential suburbs. It examines the parts played by landlords, building contractors and public authorities in changing the face of London during the nineteenth century. Public and private improvement schemes provided nowhere for the poor to live. A labourer and his family could not afford to rent the lowest class of house permitted by the Building Acts. Poor families crowded into decaying tenements vacated by the better-off. The poorest were driven from slum to slum until they could go nowhere but to hostels for down-and-outs or to the workhouse. As rookeries were pulled down and back streets were taken over by shops and offices, older neighbourhoods that were once socially mixed gave way to socially segregated and economically specialized quarters. For the not-so-poor, new doors opened. Museums and libraries made art and literature freely available to all, music halls offered cheap entertainment, railway companies organized excursions to the seaside, and a multitude of shops displayed an enormous profusion of mass-produced goods. Victorian enterprise transformed London into a raucous, competitive, vulgar emporium for an emerging consumer society. The city was cruel to the poor, but exciting for those able to escape from the poverty trap.
REVIEWS
305
During Queen Victoria’s reign, the population of London increased from under two millions to over four and a half millions and the central business district encroached more deeply into older residential areas. The working classes pressed more closely into manufacturing quarters, huddled alongside railway tracks and occupied low ground among the docks. The middle classes moved further afield towards fresh air and sunshine, in search of social separateness and domestic seclusion. On the outskirts of town, they created abodes of genteel cosiness and make-believe rusticity. Neither pub, nor church nor shop would draw them away from their homes and gardens. The railway station alone beckoned its passengers for their daily journeys to work. The inter-related searches for employment and for accommodation, the links between workplace and residence, the geographies of extending lines of transportation and suburban expansion are not explored in this book. Olsen discusses in detail the development of the Eton College Chalcots estate between Chalk Farm and Swiss Cottage, but he says little about house building in Bermondsey, Balham, Willesden or Hackney. The changing location of manufacturing and the spread of communications networks receive less attention than changes in estate planning, house design and class consciousness. This detailed examination of the history of residential segregation raises many questions for historical geographers which can only be answered by studying individuals and by learning about their families, their wealth, their occupations, their social affiliations and their tastes. Olsen has assessed the magnitude of the debt owed by present-day Londoners to their Victorian predecessors for making parts of the metropolis comfortable and agreeable places in which to live and work. On this solid foundation, future workers may build with confidence. University College London
HUGH PRINCE
WILLIAMN. PARKERand ERIC L. JONES(Eds), European Peasants and their Markets: Essays in Agrarian Economic History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. Pp. viii + 366. fl3.40) The scattering of parcels of land throughout the open fields of a township, the development of communal control of limited agricultural resources, the emergence of societies offering insurance against losses of standing crops in hailstorms, the adoption of food bottling and canning-such features permit a group of North American economists to view the history of European agriculture essentially in terms of the practice of risk minimization by farming communities. In sum, this collection of essays turns the dazzling spotlight of economic theory upon particular acts in the historical spectacle of European agriculture. Old friends look different-some better, some worse-when viewed in this new light. Practising what they preach, the editors minimize the risk of adverse criticism by choosing a diversified portfolio of eight contributions which embrace both general and particular studies, syntheses as well as analyses of aspects of European farming in a variety of periods and places. An introductory apologia by Parker includes a tantalizing glimpse of the development of European agriculture through Malthusian, Smithian and Schumpeterian phases, argues that farmers tried to remove uncertainties from their activities by estimating probabilities of success and by devices to spread risk, but also disarmingly admits that a variety of non-economic factors operated, thereby limiting “wholly rational explanation” of agricultural history. Nonetheless, an ambitious survey by Hoffmann of medieval field systems concludes that common fields originated “as a conservative and equilibrium-maintaining response by a group whose outlook and experience easily and not irrationally guided them in that direction”. An elegantly theoretical justification in economic terms of Marc Bloch’s contention that parcels were scattered throughout open fields in order to spread the risks of crop damage and failure is