524 Reviews own essay makes more direct use ofMelville's annotations to reveal how his rereading of Milton in i86o informed the poems (mostly written towards the end of the Civil War) that comprise Battle-Pieces, and Aspects of theWar (i866). In particular, the war in heaven offered theAmerican poet 'a revision, and a critique, of themartial epic mode' (pp. 47-48) and his interpretation of Paradise Lost as 'a failed theodicy' (p. 50) underpinned his attempt 'to break the cycle of apocalyptic thinking-persecution, judgement, vindication' (p. 65) in a plea for tolerance towards the defeated South. Melville's 'quarrel with God' is pursued further in John T. Shawcross's analysis of the long poem Clarel, which leads to the conclusion that both poets, 'working in the same arenas ofphilosophicuncertainty' (p.7I), came to accept 'Conscience Milton's God's umpire' as the best guide for humankind (p. 86). Melville's annotations suggest toDavid V. Urban that, if 'we read Clarel through the lens of Samson Agonistes'(p. 94), we seemore clearly Melville's rejection of theMiltonic belief that God can sometimes communicate with his followers 'in an intelligible way' (p. 105). The transcription that occupies the second half of the volume meticulously repro duces the markings made by Melville inMitford's edition ofMilton-underlinings, vertical scorings in themargin, crosses, ticks, and verbal comments-and in each case sufficient unmarked text isprinted 'to provide context for the targeted lines' (p. I I5). As Douglas Robillard suggests-and as the foregoing essays amply demonstrate these marginalia are clearly 'the working notes of a professional author' (p. I 13). They also offer a fascinating insight into themindset of a radical nineteenth-century reader who impatiently glossed an allusion to the doctrine of election as 'that theo logical fiction' (p. 127), readily assumed that words 'Put into Satan's mouth' were 'spoken with John Milton's tongue' (p. I73), and regretted 'the deforming effect of the intrusion of partizan topics & feelings of the day' into 'Lycidas' (p. I96). Students of both writers and periods will find much to stimulate further thought in this useful and carefully produced volume. UNIVERSITYOFBIRMINGHAM ROBERT WILCHER Imagining London, 1770-I900. By ALAN ROBINSON. Houndmills: Palgrave. 2004. XiX+29I pp. ?50. ISBN 1-4039-3289-I. 'Writing the history of a vast city like London is likewriting a history of the ocean the area is so vast, its inhabitants are so multifarious, the treasures that lie in its depths so countless. What aspect of the great chameleon city should one select?' George Thornbury's question, posed in i873, is a good one. His own answer is to take the reader on a walking tour, street by street, alley by alley, and to offer a 'narrative' of the history, people, and places of Old and New London, supporting his text with 'numerous engravings'. Having completed two stout volumes, Thornbury handed over to Edward Walford, and by I878 six volumes, each containing over fifty chapters, had covered the terrain. The project then moved on toGreater London. This method of breaking a huge and multi-faceted subject down into bite-size pieces has been followed by subsequent historians. Each chapter of Liza Picard's Dr. Johnson's London: Life in London I740-I770 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), for example, isdivided into short, sometimes very short, thematic sections. Peter Ackroyd regards the city as a 'human shape with its own laws of life and growth', and the city has many limbs and organs: London: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000) has no fewer than seventy-eight chapters. Alan Robinson, who isProfessor of English at theUniversity of St Gallen, Switzer land, regards it as 'inevitable' that he cannot be comprehensive, and sets out to combine what he calls the 'panoramic' with 'an insistence on the particularity and MLR, I01.2, 2oo6 525 complexity of individual imaginings of "London"' (p. xiv). The inverted commas indicate that this is a tale of two cities: 'the actual spaces of the metropolis' and 'an imaginary "London", an interior world constructed from personal sensory and imaginative experience but also from verbal and visual representations'. There has, in Robinson's view, been too great an emphasis in recent critical...