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.

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