940 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE While it is difficult to fault a book that shows such a high degree of preparation, a few criticisms come to mind. Wilson asserts on page 17 that no textbooks were published on the technology of gas lighting until Frederich Accum’s 1819 book describing the London gasworks. It seems Accum’s primer, A Practical Treatise on Gas-Light, first published in 1815, was somehow missed. And on far too many occasions the author brings attention to points that are to be substantiated or expanded on later. These are bothersome intrusions and serve no useful purpose. If they are absolutely necessary, then they suggest that ideas may be misarranged and perhaps more time should have been spent organizing the book. Of course, they may also mirror the author’s exuberance for his subject—a desire to show that a business history is an intricate and engrossing weave of myriad details. William Worthington Mr. Worthington is with the Division of Engineering and Industry at the National Museum of American History. The Victorian Post Office: The Growth of a Bureaucracy. By C. R. Perry. Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell & Brewer, 1992. Pp. viii + 308; tables, notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $79.00. At first glance, the British Post Office hardly seems to be a fitting subject for an insightful study of technology. But during the Victorian period the British Post Office assumed control of the nation’s tele communication systems, and C. R. Perry offers a solid policy history—and an even better administrative history—of the national ization of the telegraph in 1870 and the telephone in 1912. Perry frames his history of the Post Office, the largest public or private enterprise in Britain until 1922, as an inquiry in administra tion and business-government relations. This approach spares the reader much of the minutiae that too often overwhelms postal histories (the judicious use of tables and appendixes also helps in this regard). The first part of the book, “Administrative Contexts,” char acterizes the changing roles of the postmaster general, a political appointee, and the permanent secretary, who presided over the department’s professional staff. Perry also describes the financial control the Treasury exercised over the Post Office. In fact, the Post Office’s ventures into new enterprises varied with the shifting empha sis on revenue considerations and public service obligations. Arrange ments with railroads and steamship lines to carry the mails, the subject of two chapters, also affected the department’s financial health. Proponents of a mixed economy viewed the Post Office, with its unmatched infrastructure and weil-accepted role as a facilitator of commerce, as the logical site to graft new business services onto government. (Even Adam Smith acknowledged the Post Office’s TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 941 proper sphere in the economy, Perry notes.) The success of Post Office Savings Banks, started in 1861, cultivated goodwill among the public and politicians and emboldened the department’s technocrats. When private telegraph companies displeased business users with a rate hike in the mid-1860s and enraged provincial newspapers by blocking the formation of a press association, postal officials and their allies saw another opportunity for expanded government enterprise. In his best chapter, Perry analyzes the developments that culmi nated in the nationalization of the telegraph. He takes issue with Jeffrey Kieve’s The Electric Telegraph in the U.K., which argues that postal bureaucrats largely engineered parliamentary approval of the takeover. Perry properly credits postal officials but convincingly shows that nationalization enjoyed broad support. The takeover plan, fully examined and debated in Parliament, earned endorsements from both Conservative and Liberal governments. Politicians, the public, and even important segments of the business community came to believe that the Post Office would extend telegraph services where private firms had failed to do so, would establish a more equitable rate schedule, and could manage all of this without becoming a drain on the Treasury. The nationalization of the telephone in 1912 capped thirty-six years of policy-making fits and starts. Perry disagrees with the prevailing interpretation that the Post Office intentionally hindered the devel opment of the telephone because of the competition it posed...