Weidenfeld £20 pp384

All history writers speak Victorian. They do it in their sleep. They do the Thames, cholera, Dickens, the Great Exhibition, workhouses, Mrs Beeton, fog, Peelers, Board Schools, hub of empire and the tiny queen in black mourning her Albert. Readers can speak it, too. There were moments in Liza Picard’s Victorian London where I found myself murmuring the lines before they were on the page.

After Asa Briggs, Christopher Hibbert, Roy Porter, Peter Ackroyd and a host of others, I am tempted to ask how much more exegesis Britain’s capital city can stand. To most readers of popular history, Victorian London must be the best-known place on Eearth, with its chapter headings on streets, smells, destitution and poverty, amusements, crime and punishment, the working class and that ubiquitous Great Exhibition. When the descriptions are taken from well-thumbed contemporary accounts, familiarity can breed ennui.

Yet Picard is an old hand at this game. She has given us a lighter-weight Elizabeth’s London, Restoration London and Dr Johnson’s London. She cannot be denied her bid for the heavyweight crown. She writes the old history, descriptive and unanalytical, painted in exhilarating colours. Victorian London was made for her, finest examplar of the greatest urban age since the Renaissance.

Picard plunges in with the putrid “smells of London”, a mixture of sewage, dung, gas and offal. No one could escape it. When Queen Victoria went to see theGreat Eastern being Londonwas made for her,, finest examplar of the greatest urban age since the Renaissance, was made for her. Picard plunges in with the putrid “smells of London”, a mixture of sewage, dung, gas and offal. No oneNobody could escape it. When Queen Victoria went to see the Great Eastern being built at Millwall, it was noted that “she used her nosegay all the time”. We move on to the Great Stink of 1859, the fogs and pollution and the diseases with which they were associated. Picard is strong on death. We read of ships blowing up, wharfs gutted by fire, cholera plagues. Over against them stand those archetypal British heroes, the mighty Victorian reformers, who build embankments and water supplies, hospitals and railways, poorhouses, Poor Housesand Board Schools. Picard is in thrall to them all.

This Victorian London is subject to a rolling dialectic. The past is a horror that can only be remedied by the relentless march of “improvement”. The dreadful state of London streets is thus conquered by the dignity of Cubitt’s Belgravia and the Underground railway. The terrors of cholera and tuberculosis are met by Florence Nightingale and her nurses. Ignorance and crime are overcome by philanthropy and such essentially Victorian institutions as the Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Society for the Rescue of Boys Not Yet Convicted of Any Criminal Offence.

Every ill sof the city haves an inventor, social reformer or entrepreneur waiting to cure it, be it pain in childbirth (chloroform) or an unkempt lawn (“Shank’s new improved patent lawn mowing, rolling, collecting and delivering machine patronised on five separate occasions by Her Majesty the Queen”). It is portrayed as a society of seemingly impossible virtue. The Ragged School movement’s declared aim was to meet “the weary longing for kindness from our fellow men, and the delight in finding it.”. There is a dignity to the language of Victorian philanthropy that is absent from the jargon of the welfare state.

Picard’s speciality has always been the mundane, the details of home and hearth, society above and below stairs. Here she is in her element, with Mayhew, Mrs Beeton and Jane Carlyle always at her elbow. “Advice to a young woman” occupies four dense pages, including “never be in the company of an unmarried man alone, unless considerations such as the imminence of an acceptable proposal of marriage outweigh normal rules”. It is hard to see how this advice could ever yield such a proposal. We learn how to make Cabinet Puddingcabinet pudding and how to dress everything from a turkey to a table, a bosom or a child. Men’s facial hair must be cut just so, and never be ginger. A lady’s must be removed by a solution of arsenic, which explains its frequent use for domestic murder.

Picard leaves few corners of the city undisclosed. We watch a boa-constrictor killing a duck at the zoo. We see William Morris contriving to vomit outside the Great Exhibition, sickened by the taste he had seen inside. We hear of Karl Marx elected a Cconstable of the Vestry of St Pancras and challenging a hostile reviewer to a duel. People and images tumble over each other across the canvas, Chadwick and Bazalgette, Engels and Smiles, even JC Loudon and his patent garden manure.

I wish Picard had plunged just a little deeper beneath the surface. She is clearly bored by the physical development of the city, by the great estates and the families that sponsored them. We hear little of the growth of London’s grander suburbs, a phenomenon unequalled in Europe, of Pimlico, Kensington and Holland Park and the speculators and bankrupts thatwho seethed round them. This is a book of people, not places.

Nor is there much discussion of the politics of the city, well-exemplified in that Victorian classic, the battle for Hampstead Heath. Nor does Picard attempt the biggest hole in London studies, the evolving governance of the metropolis. What, for instance, was Marx doing as a St Pancras Cconstable? Where is the venality of the vestries and the Metropolitan Board of Works, and the reason why London government needed reforming ten10 years before the rest of Britain? There is something missing here, the tenourtenor of a metropolis whose character was exported across the British Empire and gave birth to British democracy.

Picard’s London is, rather, a series of stage sets, as if prepacked from Marshall and Snelgrove or Charles Harrod’s new shop in Knightsbridge. On them her characters play their parts, living, loving, working and playing, but not interacting with each other in the city’s political economy. As a result they can all seem a bit like Goody-Two-Shoes. two-shoes. But then I am sure Picard would retort withthat there are plenty of books about my sort of London. She sticks to her last.

She is good at it.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £18 on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

READ ON...

websites:
www.victorianweb.org
Best general Victorian portal

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist