Dana Arnold, ed. The Metropolis and Its Image: Constructing Identities for London, c. 1750-1950. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. vi + 176 pp. $26.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-631-21667-4.
Jan Bondeson. The London Monster: A Sanguinary Tale. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. xvi + 237 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8122-3576-0.
Paul Griffiths, Mark S R Jenner, eds. Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. xii + 284 pp. $74.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7190-5152-4.
Ranald C. Michie. The London Stock Exchange: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. xiii + 672 pp. $110 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-829508-2.
Francis Sheppard. London: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. xviii + 442 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-822922-3.
Reviewed by Joseph P. Ward (Department of History, University of Mississippi)
Published on H-Albion (June, 2001)
A Turbulent Multiplicity of Simultaneous and Overlapping Narratives
A Turbulent Multiplicity of Simultaneous and Overlapping Narratives
Observers of British culture and society often comment on London's connections to the rest of the nation. Some insist that the metropolis is the heart that distributes prosperity and enlightenment to the extremities, while others maintain that London is no more than a parasite engorged on the nation's resources. For these reasons, no history of Britain could be complete without substantial discussions of London, but it is also the case that the most stimulating studies of London's past attend to its interaction with the nation and, for that matter, the wider world.
In this regard, Francis Sheppard's London: A History is exemplary. It takes a fair amount of courage, not to mention a great deal of learning, to undertake a comprehensive narrative of London's history, but Sheppard exhibits both in his tightly organized and splendidly illustrated book. Containing a compendious bibliography and discussions of the ancient and medieval periods that are as substantial as those of the Victorian era and the twentieth century, it would seem well suited to an undergraduate course on London's history. It is more substantial than Roy Porter's elegant London: A Social History (1995), though more concise than Stephen Inwood's A History of London (1999). Running throughout Sheppard's account is an emphasis on London's location at the hub of England's commercial, governmental, and cultural networks. Sheppard demonstrates that the Romans' decision to cross the Thames had a long-lasting influence, for in Roman Britain virtually all roads led to Londinium. Although London's fortunes declined for a time with those of the Roman Empire, they revived a few centuries later as the metropolis reestablished itself as a commercial and ecclesiastical center whose location proved invaluable to those who would govern the surrounding regions. When Alfred, King of Wessex, overthrew the Vikings in 886 and subsequently refortified the city--which he called Lundenburg--he set in motion the developments that would secure London's place as the center of the nation and, for a brief time in the nineteenth century, much of the world.
Sheppard is both historian and champion. He states that the purpose of his book is "to show that London is not a parasite dependant on the labours of the provinces, but has in fact been for centuries the mainspring of the cultural, economic, financial, and political life of the nation, as well as for a long period its largest manufacturing centre" (p. vii). This is largely because London was for most of its history the main connection between the provinces and the overseas world. When Sheppard employs the term "London" he seems to refer more to an economic abstraction than to a discrete physical location. He notes that during the medieval era London-based merchants began to participate actively in international markets, facilitating the movement of goods from across the southeastern counties to the Continent and beyond, and from the eighteenth century onwards financial institutions based in London encouraged British capital to be employed abroad and foreign capital to be invested domestically. In this way, London became an integral component in Britain's emergence as the first industrialized nation. For those same reasons, as the nation's industrial base has eroded over the past century so, too, has London's prominent position in international financial markets.
Ranald Michie's history of the London Stock Exchange largely echoes Sheppard's view of London's evolving relationship with the national and international economies. Michie's survey begins with three chapters tracing the exchange's early development from a marketplace for government securities in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries through its emergence in the nineteenth century as a major source for capital investment in the companies that would drive Britain's industrialization. He devotes three fourths of his book to very detailed analyses of the twists and turns of the Exchange's fortunes during the last century. The upheavals associated with the world wars transformed the exchange into something akin to a government office, which put it at a decided disadvantage when competing against rivals like New York. Not until 1979, with the abolition of exchange controls, and the series of reforms of 1986, known as "Big Bang," was the London Stock Exchange freed sufficiently from governmental regulation to compete fully in international markets once again. Only time will tell if these measures will enable the exchange to determine its own fate in a global marketplace for securities that no longer relies on the personal relationships among traders that had long made the London exchange's culture rather like that of a private club. Alongside governmental interference, Michie places the conservative--indeed, stubborn--attitudes of its members when listing the reasons for its difficulty in keeping pace with its rivals. That the exchange's current chief executive is for the first time a woman, Clara Furse, indicates how recently such attitudes have changed. It was only a generation ago that the exchange's members elected to admit women to their ranks, and that happened grudgingly in 1973 as a result of an impending merger with several small, provincial markets that already had women members.
London's development as a hub for national and international commerce fueled its physical expansion, but such growth hardly guaranteed prosperity for all residents of the metropolis. Sheppard notes throughout his survey London's dominant position in the national urban hierarchy, a dominance that seems only to have grown more pronounced with time. He also frequently reflects upon both the social distress that accompanied metropolitan expansion and the continual inability of government to manage London effectively. Sheppard spends considerable time charting the various efforts to reform metropolitan government that began in the early modern period, reached a promising point in the nineteenth century with the creation of such institutions as the Metropolitan Police and the Greater London Council, and then suffered a major setback with Mrs. Thatcher's attack on the GLC, the fallout of which is still being felt today. Indeed, at the end of his book he emphasizes the extent to which London has lost its luster by remarking that "it is hard to imagine the Hôtel de Ville in Paris or City Hall in New York being treated like London's County Hall and summarily sold off to a foreign property company" (p. 361).
If there remains anyone who romanticizes the period preceding the great wave of nineteenth-century metropolitan reform, they would be well advised to peruse Jan Bondeson's The London Monster. Much of this book is given to descriptions of a series of more than fifty attacks upon women walking the streets of the city from March 1788 through June 1790, and of the two trials that convicted Rhynwick Williams, a twenty-three year old artificial flower maker from Wales, of being the so-called London Monster responsible for the crimes. The final chapters are devoted to a wide-ranging discussion of outbreaks of mass hysteria in other places and time periods, most of which occurred well after 1790, culminating in Bondeson's quite plausible assertion that Williams was wrongfully convicted of being the Monster. The ability for the attacker--or, more probably, attackers--to avoid apprehension was greatly enhanced by the inadequacies of the forces lined up against him or them, for "in 1790 the police force patrolling the streets of London was little different, in terms of organization and efficiency, from that of 1690" (p. 12). The eventual arrest of Williams resulted in large part from the initiative of John Julius Angerstein, a Lloyd's insurance broker, to raise a subscription for a reward to be given for the apprehension of "that INHUMAN MONSTER, whoever he may be, who has of late so frequently wounded several young women" (p. 29). Bondeson has clearly immersed himself in material related to the Monster and Williams, but many of this book's features--such as the three-page list of "The Cast" at the outset, its speculation that "Had a third trial of Rhynwick Williams taken place today, the outcome might well have been a different one" (p. 198), and its apparent ignorance of Elaine Reynolds, Before the Bobbies: The Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1720-1830 (1998)--will lead specialists to think twice before relying too heavily upon his conclusions. To be fair, aside from its publication by a university press, much about this book suggests that it is intended to be a work of popular, rather than academic, historiography. If nothing else, Bondeson's book testifies to the tremendous opportunities for further research into crime, popular culture, and gender relations in late eighteenth-century London.
Although it continues to inspire monographs on topics as obvious as the Stock Exchange and as obscure as the Monster, the dynamism of London's historiography may best be found in collections of essays, for it is simply impossible for any single narrative, even one as carefully organized as Sheppard's, to convey fully the intricacies of London's past. By contrast, collections like Londinopolis and The Metropolis and its Image eschew generalization and embrace complexity. The eleven essays in Londinopolis (whose title is borrowed from a work by James Howell published in 1657) are spread across four sections: "Polis and Police"; "Gender and Sexuality"; "Senses of Space and Place"; and "Material Culture and Consumption." They are all well-researched, crisply written, and worthy of the interest of specialists, but they share little else, which lends considerable credibility to the editors' remark that together they constitute "a turbulent multiplicity of simultaneous and overlapping narratives" (p. 8). Several chapters offer microhistories of topics such as food consumption (Sara Pennell), the evolution of parochial rituals (Michael Berlin), the changing character of water distribution (Mark Jenner), and thief-taking (Tim Wales) that seldom find their way into surveys like Sheppard's. Others offer new takes on subjects with which historians of London are increasingly familiar, such as popular politics (Ian Archer), women in public places (Laura Gowing) and in court cases (Margaret Hunt), and the urban context of disease (Margaret Pelling). Picking up chronologically where Londinopolis leaves off, The Metropolis and its Image offers an engaging and relatively coherent analysis of the various, and sometimes contradictory, identities of London that emerge in a number of contexts and media during the period of London's greatest influence in the nation and the world. Taken together, the chapters constitute a loose narrative, beginning with discussions of the representations of London in the eighteenth century in essays by Lucy Peltz and Elizabeth McKellar, proceeding to a series of nineteenth-century topics including the controversies swirling around the treatment of animals in the metropolis (Diana Donald) and the place of London Bridge in civic and national iconography (Dana Arnold), and culminating in examinations of the twentieth-century metropolis as a capital city (M.H. Port), the rebuilding of bank headquarters (Iain Black), and the ways in which only the French theoretician Jacques Lacan--or, in his absence, the character of Mrs. Wilberforce in the Ealing Comedy The Ladykillers--can help us with our need for a compelling figure for London (Adrian Rifkin).
After reading the works under review here, one cannot help but notice repeatedly that for many historians the term "London" has come to signify not a place but rather a series of relationships that extend across time and space. In her introduction to The Metropolis and its Image, Dana Arnold posits, quite justifiably, that "the city is a means of giving coherence to diversity" (p. 1). Perhaps that may explain the current vitality of the historiography of London, for several of the authors considered here seem drawn to studying the metropolis in order to illuminate far more than a locality, albeit a very big one. After all, from some perspectives London--in the form of its social, economic, political, and cultural influences--may be found nearly everywhere. This is in large degree the result of the movement of so many people to and from the metropolis during the course of their lives. When Margaret Pelling suggests in her striking contribution to Londinopolis that in early modern England there came into being "a mode of metropolitan living which was mobile, the effect of constant movement in and out of the city on a periodic, even daily basis" (p. 154), she is getting at much the same thing as Sheppard when he remarks that during the nineteenth century "[c]easeless mobility, made possible by new means of transport, became one of the hallmarks of modern urban civilization" (p. 264). London was, and is, to be found inscribed not so much on a map but rather upon everyone who has come under its considerable sway.
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Citation:
Joseph P. Ward. Review of Arnold, Dana, ed., The Metropolis and Its Image: Constructing Identities for London, c. 1750-1950 and
Bondeson, Jan, The London Monster: A Sanguinary Tale and
Griffiths, Paul; Jenner, Mark S R, eds., Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London and
Michie, Ranald C., The London Stock Exchange: A History and
Sheppard, Francis, London: A History.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5238
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