Since it was a prime social manifestation of the industrial revolution, the Victorian city more than merits serious attention by historians. It became the symbol of the de-ruralisation of the British (or more specifically, English) poor, and was the vehicle for the rise of the middle classes. These themes and others are discussed in detail by Tristram Hunt in this book.
Its three sections deal broadly with the establishment of the new cities, their development, and their decline. Together with familiar tales from familiar sources about the condition of the urban poor, Dr Hunt has found some unfamiliar tales and sources as well. He is clearly knowledgeable about architecture (though surprisingly does not mention, in his passage on the architect, how George Gilbert Scott used the study of French and Italian decoration made for his aborted plan for the new Foreign Office to design St Pancras station). His section on Victorian developments in sanitation, and the work of Bazalgette in particular, is excellent. He has noted some of the intellectual themes of Victorian life, notably the Gothic revival, the comfort blanket of mediaevalism and the resurrection of the distinction between Saxons and Normans, and analysed them thoughtfully. He understands and writes well about a few of the great personalities of the period, notably Joe Chamberlain. His scholarship is extensive, albeit based rather more heavily on printed sources than might have been ideal. He has written, all in all, a serious book that rounds up much of what one needs to know about the cities of the 19th century and those who made them.
One must, though, enter three reservations about this work. The first Dr Hunt’s at times superficial understanding of the Victorian sages whom he, quite rightly, discusses in terms of their philosophical impact on the nature of urban life. He takes Carlyle too much at face value, which is always a mistake. Alarm bells ring when Dr Hunt writes of the Sage’s Ayrshire childhood (it was Dumfriesshire). He quotes a view Carlyle took of the Irish peasants who swarmed into English industrial cities, but fails to balance it by quoting the compassionate view he took of the Irish after he had visited the country after the potato famine with his proto-Fenian friend Charles Gavan Duffy. He says that Carlyle was being typically contrary when sticking up for the Normans at a time when the Saxons were in vogue. Had he read Carlyle properly, he would have seen that Carlyle defined the Normans as a Germanic race (which indeed they were) and was, therefore, praising people of Germanic descent just as was everyone else. Given that Dr Hunt admits that Marx and Engels hijacked Carlyle’s phrase about ‘the cash nexus’, it is hard to see why he quotes the hijackers with such authority and awe when they are merely repeating something Carlyle said, far more originally and effectively, nine years earlier. Similarly, the author appears not to have appreciated the ideological progress made by Ruskin during his long public life, or the irony of Ruskin’s statement at the opening of Praeterita that ‘I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school — Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, and Homer’s.’ He takes no account of Ruskin’s highly relevant musings in Time and Tide and Unto This Last, perhaps because they would sit uncomfortably with his thesis. His uncritical assessment of Dickens is unfortunate. And his assault on Samuel Smiles, the doctor, railways executive and editor who wrote Self Help, is simply ignorant. Given that the author cites intellectual influences, it is surprising that Mill hardly features in his book.
Part of the problem, perhaps, is that at times this interesting work of history degenerates into political polemic, which is the second problem. Lady Thatcher, who was not born until 1925 and who did not become prime minister until 140 years after Carlyle wrote Chartism, is occasionally wheeled onto the stage for a kicking. So is poor old Keith Joseph, for his crime of writing in praise of Dr Smiles. Such juvenile attempts to relate Dr Hunt’s political hate figures to the much earlier age about which he is writing are silly and gratuitous. Some of the author’s attempts at jokes would be funny if they were more rooted in fact. Jesting that the Economist, an ‘anti-European’ newspaper in Victorian times, has not changed belies the rather tedious and wrong-headed support that that organ gave to the great European project at about the time of the downfall of Dr Hunt’s b
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