Peter Ackroyd
THAMES
Sacred river
456pp. Chatto & Windus. £25.
978 070117284 8
Thames: Sacred River is a huge book which goes its own way, takes its time,
covers long periods of history, and lovingly discovers and displays facts,
opinions, myths and imaginative renderings of its subject. Its short
chapters roughly follow the Thames from its source in Gloucestershire to its
issuing forth into the sea near Southend. In the course of the book, Peter
Ackroyd dips and dives back into the River Thames’s multiple pasts, to
prehistoric times, the Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Norman Occupations and the
centuries when it became important as a trading river, an industrialized
waterway and at different times a location for pastimes and pleasures:
fishing, boating, observing from the banks and bridges, and – though not too
much, because of its tidal flow, cold temperatures and murkiness – swimming.
Ackroyd relishes the contrasts between the “rusticity” of the narrow river
running through green countryside near its source, the river of The Wind in
the Willows and Three Men in a Boat, and the “urbanity” of the broad river
sweeping through London as the city grew and prospered along its banks.
Throughout his book he writes surprisingly, but deliberately and
unapologetically, about the “sacredness” of the Thames. It is, he says at
the end of the first chapter, the river of dreams, but it is also the river
of suicide. It has been called liquid history because within itself it
dissolves and carries all epochs and generations. They ebb and flow like
water.
This passage is representative. It is commanding, lucid, confident and
confidence- inspiring, yet impressionistic, metaphorical, carrying us along
on a rhetorical surge, perhaps in the hope that we won’t ask too curiously
who called the Thames “liquid history” and what that might add to our
knowledge of the river, or notice that if the remarks about dreams and
suicide, ebb and flow, are true of the Thames, they are likely to be equally
true of any large river – the Nile or the Tiber, for example. We are to
accompany Ackroyd on his enthusiastic journey and are to believe, with him,
in the “sacredness” of a river which has, in truth, as the book amply shows,
many features belonging to its history and geography which seem very far
from spirituality.
The first few chapters are somewhat burdened by Ackroyd’s desire to cast the
Thames as both representative of the genus river, and a special and
particular example of the genus. Until he reaches the age of British
greatness on the world stage, and the reigns of kings and queens from Henry
VIII and Elizabeth I to Victoria when he can glory in the river’s
geopolitical and historical particularities and the grand uses made of it by
those monarchs, his efforts to give us a distinctive river rely partly on
physical details about its depth and breadth at different points, the
landscape of its banks, the flora and fauna of its meadows, creeks, islands
and tributaries. Such details have their interest and are described with
gusto. Ackroyd is, however, as his subtitle discloses, more deeply engaged
by the spiritual and imaginative uses human beings have made of the river,
its mythical qualities for early riverside dwellers, whose water rites and
ceremonies can be reconstructed, or guessed at, from ancient burial mounds
such as those discovered at Abingdon in Oxfordshire. Aerial photography, he
points out, has “produced ghost images of ancient enclosures close to the
Thames, shadow lands of lines and rectangles and circles scarcely visible
within the modern terrain”. For imaginative renderings, often full of
mythological allusions, he invokes the many English poets who have turned
their attention to the Thames, from Chaucer and Spenser to Milton,
Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot.
Ackroyd’s prose sustains its visionary tone through many a chapter,
discussing, with perverse but equal relish, matters such as sewage, rubbish,
corpses, poverty, the back-breaking labour and free swearing of those
industrialized Thames-side inhabitants and workers of the late eighteenth
century onwards. The sinister Thames of Dickens’s novels, of suicides,
murder victims, and the “resurrection men” who pillaged their bodies at
night; the stinking river of 1858, when raw sewage flowing into the Thames
on a summer day caused Members of Parliament to run from the chamber
clutching handkerchiefs to their noses, pushed finally to decide that
something must be done; and the busy scenes of hundreds of ships plying up
and down, and the loading and unloading of goods in the docks which caught
the admiring attention of visitors like Engels – this Thames is given full
attention by Ackroyd, as we might expect from the biographer of Dickens. He
reminds us of the forgotten origin of words in current use such as “toe-rag”
(a worker in the grain warehouses of Millwall Docks who wore sacking over
his boots) and “stevedore” from the Spanish word for packer, “estibador”.
Ackroyd has the gift of romanticizing the everyday; his writing is the
linguistic equivalent of Turner’s painting “Rain, Steam, and Speed – the
Great Western Railway”, and he shows how that painting itself (reproduced
here among many beautiful colour illustrations) celebrates the confident
genius of Brunel as represented by the bridge at Maidenhead. Ackroyd’s
sentences celebrate and emulate both the constructive talent of Brunel and
the descriptive talent of Turner:
"The bridge itself, constructed by Brunel, was a miracle of engineering.
It was the largest span of brick building in Europe. It was believed by many
that it could not be finished or, once erected, that it could never last. It
was thrown across the river in two spans, the central arches meeting on an
eyot in the middle of the Thames. The original contractor, distraught at the
problems of the enterprise, had asked to be relieved of his
responsibilities; it was feared that once the wooden scaffolding had been
removed the arches would collapse. Brunel stayed true to his original
vision. Those small red bricks have, in the last 170 years, been subject to
a pressure that must approach the extreme limit of sustainability; yet they
have survived."
This is what is best about Ackroyd’s book, its combination of heightened prose
and instructive detail. Although Thames: Sacred river abounds in such
moments, it is, at nearly 450 pages, a little bloated. The author does not
often resist the temptation to finish off a chapter, section, or even
paragraph with a sounding but unnecessary flourish. After quoting a passage
about suicides from Waterloo Bridge, in Dickens’s essay “Night Walks”
(1860), Ackroyd offers the redundant conclusion: “For Dickens the river was
inextricably bound up with the consciousness of death”. And is it necessary
to spell out that those, like Turner and Milton, who are born by the river
“claim an especial affinity with it”? More seriously, the connecting phrase
“that is why” is employed far too often in order to persuade the reader of a
logical relation which does not exist. Thus he follows a passage of
quotation from John Evelyn describing Charles II’s great river pageant in
1662, celebrating his Restoration and marriage to Catherine of Braganza with
the puzzling remark “That is why, at the time of the Plague and the Fire, in
1665 and 1666 respectively, [the Thames] became the instinctive place of
refuge”. Surely, says the no-nonsense reader, people turned to the Thames
because it was their nearest escape route from plague and fire, not because
their King had chosen to revive Tudor pageantry in order to consolidate his
position after the recent period of Republicanism.
Thames is the product of prodigious research, more than could have been
undertaken by one person; indeed, Ackroyd duly acknowledges his two
researchers, Thomas Wright and Murrough O’Brien, at the end of the book.
Scholars and students will, however, feel frustrated by the lack of
footnotes giving details of the widely scattered sources, and will also
perhaps feel cheated by the numerous occasions where no particular source is
even hinted at, Ackroyd preferring a general “It has often been thought”.
Nonetheless, the book is a rich offering by a masterly writer.
Rosemary Ashton's most recent book, 142 Strand: A radical address in
Victorian London, will be published in paperback early next year.
