Victorian City Research Articles

Sylvia M. Barnard. To Prove I'm Not Forgot: Living and Dying in a Victorian City. Manchester: Manchester University Press; distributed by St. Martin's Press, New York, N.Y. 1990. Pp. xi, 212. $39.95.

Sylvia M. Barnard. To Prove I'm Not Forgot: Living and Dying in a Victorian City. Manchester: Manchester University Press; distributed by St. Martin's Press, New York, N.Y. 1990. Pp. xi, 212. $39.95.

Victorian Connections edited by Jerome J. McGann (review)

Reviews113 combined to produce the photograph, another of the Victorian triumphs over time and space, leading to fashions such as cartes de visite and pictures on postcards, themselves a hugely popular Victorian craze. Even the Queen and Albert kept a darkroom at Windsor. But not everyone approved. "The Weekly Times and Echo in 1893 applauded the formation of a 'Vigilance Association with the purpose of thrashing cads with cameras who go about in seaside places taking snapshots of ladies emerging from the deep. ' " This is a book of impressive erudition. Its bibliographical notes are a great convenience for further reading, and the index is extensive. It is, perhaps, an odd book, tending towards an anatomy, but I like odd books, Burton ' s Anatomy, Tristram Shandy, Sartor Resartus. Within its general compass, it goes off in all directions and sometimes fatigues attention, but it adds up to a significant piece of cultural history, a worthy successor to Victorian People and Victorian Cities. R. D. McMaster University ofAlberta Jerome J. McGann, ed. Victorian Connections. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1989. 214. $29.50 US. This collection of essays is offered in "homage" to Cecil Y. Lang by a group of Victorianists influenced by his teaching and his scholarship, especially as these matured during the more than thirty years Lang spent at the University of Virginia. Such Festschriften can be notoriously uneven, and this particular collection does not quite live up to the publisher's claim that it "definefs] the shape that Victorian studies will be taking in the immediate future." However, the general quality of the essays assembled here is remarkably high, while a number of the connections they explore will surely inspire further work along similar lines. The first essay in the collection is an enterprising piece by Jerome McGann in which he makes connections between the history of literary studies in the United States since 1945 and the career of Cecil Lang. His comments are not of "merely" biographical interest but demonstrate, in part through a shrewd comparison between the careers of Lang and Paul de Man, how far we have come in understanding the social forces that shape scholarship, however disinterested that scholarship may purport to 114Victorian Review be. McGann ' s development beyond formalism in his own work as critic and editor is seen to be anticipated and authorized by Lang ' s practice in editing the correspondence of Swinburne, Tennyson, and now Matthew Arnold. It is a practice distinguished by "first of aU, a materialist orientation toward the texts, their producers, and their reproducers; second, an uncompromising insistence upon accuracy and procedural rigor at every level, from the most abstract areas of critical method to the local details of prose style; and third, a clear understanding that memory—not forgetting—is the mother of the muses, and one of the essential bases of aU culture as weU" (6). Many of us who admire the erudition and insight displayed by Lang may have wondered why he has not written more criticism. McGann offers a persuasive explanation of Lang ' s commitment to the editor ' s craft, and in the process makes some challenging claims about what is most valuable in the range of activities available to professional students of uterature, and to Victorians in particular. The principal lessons of a career like Lang's would seem to be the following: daring to defy academic fashion may cost the scholar influence and celebrity in the short run, but the American academy is sufficiently large and diverse to accommodate and reward someone who was "already moving out of fashion in 1949"; a commitment to phüology and history may result in more enduring achievement than New Criticism and deconstruction can lay claim to; and, perhaps most important of all, there ought to be as much consistency as possible between a scholar's pedagogy and her publications. Lang's beUef in diversity and divergence as indelibly marking the materials of Victorian (or any other) culture caused him to teach and write with a humility more ironic than abject, and he must surely be pleased by the kinds of indirect and independent tributes to him offered here. The essay by Karen Chase that foUows McGann ' s...

To prove I'm not forgot: living and dying in a Victorian city

Decline and fall down those mean streets saving souls a chapter of accidents the great and the good architect, lawyer, left in the lurch better dead than red just a song at twilight gone to the bad in loving memory.

Representing the slum

Robert Darnton writes that one can read cities as one does texts. Few historians would disagree. After all, the doyen of British urban history, H.J. Dyos, had been ‘reading’ streetscapes since the 1950s. Moreover, his peers had long felt comfortable with the idea that cities were templates which could in a sense be read in order to extract the historical developments that were ‘reflected’ in them. A younger generation of urban historians had been enthralled by the release in 1973 of the remarkable two-volume The Victorian City, and by the unfolding patterns through which its contributors sought to read the nineteenth-century cityscape. But now, well into the second decade after The Victorian City's first publication, it is timely to ask how have historians sought to read? My conclusion is unflattering. It seems to me that historians are awkwardly equipped to interpret the urban past because of their primitive approach to texting the past. Some of the most successful readings of the urban past have drawn less from history than from archaeology, architecture, geography, literary criticism, and cultural anthropology. Such analysis is more directly geared to address the essence of the text: its immediacy to a particular audience. The texts which historians think of familiarly as their own are in fact anchored in the local horizons of people other than ourselves. Their context is not our own. Moreover, their quality is profoundly dynamic. They were tools by which people addressed and sustained common-sense meanings and rhythms amidst the indeterminacies of daily living in ever-changing urban settings.

Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley, editors. The Irish in the Victorian City. Wolfeboro, N.H.: Croom Helm Ltd. 1985. Pp. 312. $32.50.

Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley, editors. The Irish in the Victorian City. Wolfeboro, N.H.: Croom Helm Ltd. 1985. Pp. 312. $32.50.

The Irish in the Victorian city Edited by Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley. Pp 312. London: Croom Helm. 1985. £18.95.

The Irish in the Victorian city Edited by Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley. Pp 312. London: Croom Helm. 1985. £18.95.

Governing the Metropolis-Politics, Technology and Social Change in a Victorian City: Melbourne 1850-1891

Governing the Metropolis-Politics, Technology and Social Change in a Victorian City: Melbourne 1850-1891

House and Home in the Victorian City: Working-Class Housing, 1850–1914. By M. J. Daunton. Baltimore: Edward Arnold, 1983. Pp. ix, 320. $65.00.

House and Home in the Victorian City: Working-Class Housing, 1850–1914. By M. J. Daunton. Baltimore: Edward Arnold, 1983. Pp. ix, 320. $65.00.

Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City. London: Croom Helm. 1985. 311 pp. £18.95.

Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City. London: Croom Helm. 1985. 311 pp. £18.95.

The outcast Irish in the British Victorian city: problems and perspectives

The early decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a substantial increase in the pace and scale of Irish emigration to Britain, a process which culminated in the massive Irish pauper influx of 1845-51 in the wake of the Irish famine. During this period the Irish-born population of England, Scotland and Wales rose from 415,000 in 1841 to 727,000 in 1851, reaching 805,000 in 1861, when it comprised 3.5 per cent of the population. Thereafter, the number of Irish-born declined to 653,000 in 1891, reviving only in the twentieth century. These figures do not, however, include the children of Irish immigrants born in Britain; thus the actual size of ethnic Irish communities was undoubtedly much higher than contemporary census returns suggest. Indeed, a survey of the Irish in Britain conducted in 1872 by the Nation, a Dublin weekly newspaper, argued that the number of Irish-born indicated in official statistics should be doubled in order to arrive at a more realistic enumeration of the ethnic Irish community in Britain.

Relics of old London: Photographs of a changing Victorian City

Abstract The Victorian era was a period of tremendous growth and change. The cities of the era, as precursors of today's, have attracted much attention because they seem capable of .deepening understanding of the dynamics of urban social and morphological change.1 Study of these cities also lends insight into Victorian society's perceptions and responses to rapid change, attitudes which were held in tension between excitement about progress and alarm over change at the expense of long-lived traditions.

Reviews

Book reviewed in this articleREVIEW OF PERIODICAL LITERATURE, 1985GREAT BRITAINAlan Macfarlane. Marriage and love in England: modes of reproduction, 1300‐1840.A. L. Beier & Roger Finlay (Eds.) The making of the metropolis: London, 1500‐1700.Gary Stuart De Krey. A fractured society: the politics of London in the first age of party, 1688‐1715.Celia Miller. The account books of Thomas Smith, Ireley Farm, Hailes, Gloucestershire, 1865‐1871Joel Mokyr. The economics of the industrial revolution.Gail Malmgreen. Silk town: industry and culture in Macclesfield, 1750‐7835.C. Emsley and J. Walvin (Eds.). Artisans, peasants and proletarians, 1760‐1860.Jane LewisAngela V. JohnJohn Knott. Popular opposition to the 1834 Poor Law.Pat Thane and Anthony Sutcliffe (Eds.). Essays in social history, volume 2.Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (Eds.). The Irish in the Victorian city.M. J. Daunton. Royal Mail: the Post Office since 1840.Gordon Phillips and Noel Whiteside. The unemployment question in the port transport industry.Roger Davidson. Whitehall and the labour problem in late‐Victorian and Edwardian England.Paul JohnsonSaving and spending: the working‐class economy in Britain, 1870‐1939.G. C. Peden. British economic and social policy: Lloyd George to Margaret Thatcher.Richard SavilleCharles Wilson. First with the news: the history of W. H. Smith, 1792‐1972.Derek H. Aldcroft. The British economy. Volume I. The years of turmoil, 1920‐1951.GENERALJohn M. Merriman. The red city: Limoges and the French nineteenth century.Malou Haine. Les facteurs d'instruments de musique à paris au 19e siècle: les artisans face à l'industrialisation.Maurice Leavy‐Leboyer and Franclois Bourgignon. L'économie française au XIXe siècle.Robert G. MoellerThomas N. Bisson. Fiscal accounts of Catalonia under the early count‐kings, 1151‐1213.T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (Eds.). The Brenner debate: agrarian class structure and economic development in pre‐industrial Europe.Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees. The making of urban Europe, 1000‐1950.Jonathan I. Israel. European Jewry in the age of mercantilism, 1550‐1750.Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Hans‐Gerhard Husung (Eds.). The development of trade unionism in Great Britain and Germany, 1880‐1914.John Gillingham. Industry and politics in the Third Reich: Ruhr coal, Hitler and Europe.John R. Lampe. The Bulgarian economy in the twentieth century.Om Prakash. The Dutch East Indian Company and the economy of Bengal, 1630‐1720Jackson Turner Main. Society and economy in colonial Connecticut.Francis G. Couvares. The remaking of Pittsburgh: class and culture in an industrializing city, 1877‐1918.Chris Mcguffie. Working in metal: management and labour in the metal industries of Europe and the USA, 1890‐1914.Sanford M. Jacoby. Employing bureaucracy: managers, unions and the transformation of work in American industry, 1900‐1945.Jon Gjerde. From peasants to farmers: the migration from Balestrand Norway, to the upper Middle West.Bernd Martin and Alan S. Milward (Eds.). Agriculture and food supply in the second world war.Michael F. Hendy. Studies in the Byzantine monetary economy, c. 300‐1450.B. L. Anderson and A. J. H. Latham (Eds.). The market in history.Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jurgen Osterhammel (Eds.). Imperialism and after: continuities and discontinuitiesRobert HiggsForrest Capie and Geoffrey E. Wood (Eds.). Financial crises and the world banking system.

The Irish in the Victorian City.

The Irish in the Victorian City.

The Irish in the Victorian City. Edited by Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley. Pp. 312. Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1985. £18.95. 0 7099 3333 9

The Irish in the Victorian City. Edited by Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley. Pp. 312. Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1985. £18.95. 0 7099 3333 9

The Irish in the Victorian City

The Irish in the Victorian City

An Early History of Electricity Supply: The Story of Electric Light in Victorian Leeds

J D Poulter 1986 London: Peter Peregrinus x + 212 pp price £25 ISBN 0 86341 060 X The subtitle of this book is the more accurate: 'The story of electric light in Victorian Leeds' is an illuminating insight into the development of an electricity supply in that city at the end of the last century. The author has reconstructed the story from contemporary newspaper cuttings and the final product is an enjoyable account not only of the technical aspects (200 V DC on bare copper conductors) but also of the social background of a Victorian city.

Review: Low Cost Home Ownership: An Evaluation of Housing Policy under the Conservatives, Studies in Urban and Regional Policy 3. Home Ownership in the Inner City: Salvation or Despair?, Urban and Regional Studies 12. Housing and Urban Renewal: Residential Decay and Revitalization in the Private Sector, Surveys in Economics: Labour Economics, Uncertainty and the Labour Market: Recent Developments in Job-Search

Review: Low Cost Home Ownership: An Evaluation of Housing Policy under the Conservatives, Studies in Urban and Regional Policy 3. Home Ownership in the Inner City: Salvation or Despair?, Urban and Regional Studies 12. Housing and Urban Renewal: Residential Decay and Revitalization in the Private Sector, Surveys in Economics: Labour Economics, Uncertainty and the Labour Market: Recent Developments in Job-Search

Myths of cohesion : Capital and compromise in the historiography of nineteenth‐century Birmingham

The recent republication of four of Asa Briggs' essays on Birmingham presents an appropriate moment to consider the significance of his work in this area.' His view of the city's experience of industrialization, first expounded in I948 and reiterated through numerous impressions of Victorian Cities and Chartist Studies, has become a commonplace of British social history, as familiar as it is accessible.2 Through this body of work Briggs established a well-deserved position as a pioneer of urban history and a progenitor of the local study as a methodological device. More important, his work on Birmingham represented an early attempt to explain political configurations in terms of the social relations of production, and here, unfortunately, his lead has been followed less vigorously. Instead, as social history has developed over the last thirty years, so Briggs' model of explanation has achieved a central importance in the analysis of class relations in early industrial society. This, and the emergence of renewed interest in the dynamics of the labour process, means that it is perhaps worthwhile to re-evaluate the substance of the model and to question its validity. The model itself may be briefly summarized as follows. Industrialization in Birmingham had the effect of increasing the number of small workshops producing hardware products rather than creating large-scale units of production. As a result, a certain identity between employers and employees developed through a combination of their physical proximity within the workplace, the centrality of skilled labour to small-scale production, the absence of large-scale investment in plant and the acknowledged possibility of upward mobility from employee to employer status. In Briggs' words, the classes 'were not separated from each other by the gaunt walls of the factory ', or alternatively, 'business men and working

Book reviews

R.M. Crawford, Manning Clark, Geoffrey Blainey, Making History, McPhee Gribble/Penguin, Melbourne, 1985, pp.102, $6.95. K.S. Inglis, The Rehearsal: Autralians at War in the Sudan 1885, Rigby, Sydney, 1985. pp.176. $24.95; P. Stanley (ed.), But Little Glory: The New South Wales contingent to the Sudan, 1885, Military Historical Society of Australia, Canberra, 1985. pp.79. $7.50. Michael Blakeney, Australia and the Jewish Refugees 1933–1948, Croom Helm Australia, Sydney, 1985, pp. vii & 335, $29.95. H.O. Browning, 1975 Crisis, An Historical Overview, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1985, pp. xi & 340, $29.95, paper $14.95. Len Richardson, The Bitter Years, Wollongong during the Great Depression, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1984 pp. xvi + 256, $29.95, paper, $14.95. Arthur Murdoch, Sheer Grit, New South Wales University Press, Sydney, 1984, pp. 107, $11.95. Melbourne Historical Journal, Vol. 16, 1984, ‘The Politics of History’, University of Melbourne, pp. 114, $3; Drew Cottle (ed.), Capital Essays: Selected Papers from the General Studies Conference on Australian History, University of New South Wales, 1983, Sydney, 1984, pp. 104. David Dunstan, Governing the Metropolis, Politics, Technology and Social Change in a Victorian City: Melbourne, 1850–1891 Melbourne University Press, 1984, pp. xvii + 362, $24.50. R. J. W. Selleck and Martin Sullivan (eds), Not So Eminent Victorians, Melbourne University Press, 1984, pp. xvii + 244, $22.50. Tim Duncan and John Fogarty, Australia and Argentina, On parallel paths, Melbourne University Press, 1985, pp. xiv + 203, $22.50. Margaret Hazzard, Punishment Short of Death, Hyland House, Melbourne, 1984. pp. xiii + 284, $25.00.

Reviews

Book reviewed in this articleREVIEW OF PERIODICAL LITERATURE, 1984A selective survey of periodical literature on British economic and social history published in other journals.GREAT BRITAINT. F. T. Baker (Ed.)‐ The Victoria History of the Counties of England: A History of the County of Middlesex, Vol. VIII.K. J. Stringer. Earl David of Huntingdon, 1152‐1219: A Study in Anglo‐Scottish History.Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran. The Growth of English Schooling, 1340‐1548: Learning, Literacy, and Laicization in P re‐re formation York Diocese.Mary Prior (Ed.). Women in English Society, 1500‐1800.Philip Riden (Ed.). George Sitwell's Letterbook, 1662‐66.Philip Riden. History of Chesterfield, Volume II, Part I, Tudor and Stuart Chesterfield.Margaret Spufford. The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and their Wares in the Seventeenth Century.Patrick McGrath. (Ed.). A Bristol Miscellany.Roger Burt. The British Lead Mining Industry.John Cannon. Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth‐century England.L. E. Cochran. Scottish Trade with Ireland in the Eighteenth Century.Jeffrey G. Williamson. Did British Capitalism Breed Inequality?Richard Dennis. English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century: A Social Geography.Royden Harrison and Jonathan ZeitlinRoger Penn. Skilled Workers in the Class Structure.David J. V. Jones. The Last Rising: The Newport Insurrection of 1839.M.J. Daunton. House and Home in the Victorian City: Working‐Class Housing, 1850‐1914.Martha Vicinus. Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850‐1920.Alun Howkins. Poor Labouring Men: Rural Radicalism in Norfolk, 1870‐1923.Michael Sanderson. From Irving to Olivier: A Social History of the Acting Profession in England, 1880‐1983.R. P. T. Davenport‐Hines, Dudley Docker: The Life and Times of a Trade Warrior.Jim Tomlinson. British Macroeconomic Policy since 1940Alec Cairncross. Wars of Recovery: British Economic Policy, 1945‐51.B. A. Holderness. British Agriculture since 194S‐L. S. Pressnfxl and John Orbell. A Guide to the Historical Records of British Banking.GENERALL. A. Clarkson and E. M. Crawford. Ways to Wealth: The Cust Family of Eighteenth‐century Armagh.William H. Sewell. Structure and Mobility: The Men and Women of Marseilles, 1820‐70.Arndt Fleischer. Patentgesetzgebung und Chemisch‐Pharmazeutische Industrie im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 1871‐1918.Hknry Ashby Turner Jr. German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler.Manuel Martin Rodriguez. Pensamiento ecónomico espaol sobre la Poblacidn.Kathleen Burk. Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914‐1918.Hal S. Barron. Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth‐century New England.Charles W. Cheape. Family Firm to Modern Multinational: Norton Company, a New England Enterprise.Norman B. Wilkinson. Lammot du Pont and the American Explosives Industry, 1850 84.Steven Hahn. The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850‐90.James C. Cobb. Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877‐1984.Gilbert C. Fite. Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865‐1980.Richard B. Sheridan. Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680‐1834.Jean Stubbs. Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour History, 1860‐1958.Srinivasa Ambirajan. Political Economy and Monetary Management: India, 1766‐1914.Peter Greenhalgh. West African Diamonds, 1919‐83: An Economic History.J. C. Russell. Late Ancient and Medieval Population Control.R. J. Holton. The Transition, from Feudalism to Capitalism.Robert I. Rotberc and Theodore K. Rabb