… that you can hear in the distance is a chorus of late Times editors, who’ve been spinning in their graves since they heard it has started a “Big Brother Blog”.
But if you sometimes worry that your blog is not getting many comments, be reassured that they are getting even less ….
For Stephen Inwood, author of City of Cities: The Birth of Modern London, the answer to the question “when did London become modern?” is clearcut. He dates the change to about three decades, from the 1880s to the start of World War One. The men who marched off to France in 1914 were not, he says “leaving behind them a gas-lit, horse-drawn city.
It is true that London was still, in its worst parts, an impoverished world of slums, workhouses, sweatshops, prostitutes, dying infants, and men and women coughing with tuberculosis or bronchitis. But … Mortality, including infant mortality, had fallen by over a third, and the deadly power of infectious diseases over the population was being broken at last. Almost the whole population had been through elementary education, and many had gone food. Basic food was much cheaper, and the level and variety of population had been much improved. Families were smaller, and women of all classes were starting to escape from the servitude of repeated and unlimited childbirth.”
That passage illustrates roughly half of the concerns of City of Cities, which has an unusually strong focus on social issues. The other half of its detailed exploration of the city is of its physical and administrative infrastructure. Inwood gets down and dirty to the details of London life, from the swarm of rats which pour out of the demolished Gaiety Theatre into its restaurant before finding their way into the sewers, to the (possibly not entirely unrelated) rising rates of diarrhoea, dysentry and gastro-enteritis that the warmer weather of the 1880s brought, with consequent leaps in infant mortality.
Then he swoops to its social heights, to the hostess Lady Dorothy Nevill who in 1910 mused that: “Society, in the old sense of the term … [came] to an end in the ‘eighties of the last century. Birth today is of small account, whilst wealth wields unquestioned sway … The conquest of the West End by the City has brought a complete change of tone.” Virginia Woolf was equally unimpressed by her, a woman who “lived for 87 years and did nothing but put food in her mouth and slip gold through her fingers”.
Inwood also tells many stories of the intellectual development of the city, such as the tale of how the Everyman books were born from the desire for self-education of a struggling East End bookbinder. Joseph Dent went to his first classes at Toynbee Hall – set up to provide near university-level education to the grossly under-developed area – in 1886, aged 37, was, he said “lifted into a heaven beyond my dreams”. So he started producing cheap editions of Lamb, Shakespeare and Balzac, and later the Everyman’s Library. At a less intellectual level, by about 1900 there were about 500 newspapers and periodicals, with the print workforce growing from 40,000 in 1891 to 47,000 in 1911. Surprisingly, given the later male dominance of the industry, most of the increase came from the employment of “semi-skilled” women printers.
The detailed research – from the vast production of documentation that the Victorians loved to produce – is both the strength and weakness of City of Cities. Sometimes the sea of detail – of facts and figures and anecdote – threaten to drown the reader. I was fascinated to learn that the London Hydraulic Power Company provided 150 miles of high-pressure water lines by 1910, primarily to operate lifts, that continued working until 1977, after which the network was sold to be used for communication cables. But then there are details about its growth by decade, lists of the institutions that used it, figures and more figures, dates and more dates.
Sometimes it all gets a bit much. Given City of Cities thematic structure, however, this is not a major problem. I just skipped over the engineering details when they got a bit much, and got back into the social life. (A different reader might be doing exactly the reverse.)
And Inwood does present a strong case for claiming the foundations of modern London in his period. He explains – as any property agent might – how the cheap “working men’s fares” available on the trains that served Tottenham and Edmonton helped to shape their working class – now even underclass – character, while nearby Hornsey and Southgate were far more middle class. They had more expensive fares, far higher rates of church attendance and other “respectable” social indicators – and they still have the last two.
Many of the complaints of Londoners of the period also sound familiar today. London roads were no sooner paved than dug up, again and again. The Strand, one of the city’s main streets, was a particular cause for complaint, being, said George R Sims, “a favourite field of operations for the private companies. If one part of it is down the other is up. When the up part is finished the down part is taken up again …”
Inwood is entrancingly excited by the social revolution of the bicycle, on which I’ve already posted. He finds potential intellectual disaster in the occasion that saw George Bernard Shaw crash his wheeled steed into that of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who had stopped his bike in the middle of the road to read a street sign. “Russell, fortunately, was not even scratched, but his knickerbockers were demolished,” Shaw told a friend.
More serious, if unavoidably comic, was the incident in which two Latvian ‘anarchist’ refugees tried to rob at gunpoint the Schnurrman’s rubber factory on Tottenham High Road, which was, for them, unfortunately near a police station. “When they were confronted by the police the robber decided to shoot their way out, killing a boy and PC Tyler. There followed … a chase across Tottenham marshes, in which the killers used an electric tram, a milk cart, and a grocer’s horse and cart with its brake on, and the police chased them for six miles on an advertising cart (until the Latvians shot the pony dead), on bicycles, and in a second tram going in reverse. Using their pistols without restraint, the two men fired over 400 rounds, injuring 27 people, including seven policemen. Finally the two were cornered, and use the last of their ammunition to shoot themselves.”
I used to walk my dog over the same area – now largely abandoned to industry and reverting to the wild. It will never look the same to me again, so on this occasion, and many others in the book, I’ll forgive Inwood his attention to detail.
Other views: the Guardian’s, and Londonist’s.
Interesting review this morning on H-Albion of a book looking at the construction of nationality – Richard Helgerson’s Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England.
The argument of this lively and refreshing book is that most of these
scholars have got it wrong, at least for the sixteenth and
early-seventeenth centuries. If–and it is a big if–Englishness had
achieved some sort of definition by the sixteenth century, it was
challenged in Tudor times by a wide-ranging and sustained effort, by
writers as much as or even more than statesmen, to subordinate
Englishness (along with Welshness, Scottishness, and Irishness) to a
prior and more inclusive British identity.
The reason for this becomes obvious as soon as it pointed out. With
the Henrician Reformation, England had to come to terms with what
would otherwise have been considered centuries of humiliating
tutelage to Rome. The response was–almost brutally–to attempt to
annul in the national imagination the one-thousand-year period of
“Anglo-Saxon” history. It was the Saxons, converted by Augustine,
who had put England in thralldom to Rome. The Britons of old, on the
other hand, had converted to Christianity before the coming of
Augustine.
America, champion of democracy and a free press? I doubt one young, extremely brave, Iraqi journalist thinks so:
“American troops in Baghdad yesterday blasted their way into the home of an Iraqi journalist working for the Guardian and Channel 4, firing bullets into the bedroom where he was sleeping with his wife and children.
Ali Fadhil, who two months ago won the Foreign Press Association young journalist of the year award, was hooded and taken for questioning. He was released hours later.
Dr Fadhil is working with Guardian Films on an investigation for Channel 4’s Dispatches programme into claims that tens of millions of dollars worth of Iraqi funds held by the Americans and British have been misused or misappropriated.”
So was this yet one more American stuff-up, or something worse?
But a cheer for Norway’s equality minister:
“After a week in which the Equal Opportunities Commission in Britain has warned that it would take 40 years for women to break into the ranks of the FTSE 100 in the same way as men, Norwegian companies face a two-year deadline to ensure that women hold 40% of the seats of each company listed on the Oslo bourse. …
The requirement came into effect at the start of this year after companies were given two years to embrace the demands voluntarily following the passing of the law in 2003. …
The failure of companies to act – about half of the companies on the stock market are estimated to have no women on their boards – has prompted the Norwegian equality minister, Karita Bekkemellem, to take the draconian step of threatening firms with closure.
“From January 1 2006, I want to put in place a system of sanctions that will allow the closure of firms,” she said. “I do not want to wait another 20 or 30 years for men with enough intelligence to finally appoint women.”
Who says “draconian”? The Guardian. Someone should surely have subbed that out.
I’ve stumbled across a couple of gems recently:
An Irish “bog man” who used hair gel (well at least that’s the journalistic take on it):
“The preserved remains of two prehistoric men discovered in an Irish bog have revealed a couple of surprises – one used hair gel and the other stood 6 foot 6 inches high, the tallest Iron Age body discovered.
…the other man was quite short, about 5 foot 2 inches,” said Ned Kelly, head of antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland.
The shorter man appeared to attempt to give himself greater stature by a rather curious headdress which was a bit like a Mohican-style with the hair gel, which was a resin imported from France,” Kelly told BBC radio. …
… Kelly said the fact he was able to buy imported cosmetics suggests he was a wealthy member of Irish society about 2,300 years ago.”
And good news about the Chinese starting to treasure their heritage. A Sung dynasty merchant ship (dated to between 1127-1279), 25 metres by 10 metres and containing an estimated 70,000 piece of pottery, is to be raised whole from off Guangdong (Canton) and, it is hoped, eventually put on display in a sea-water tank.
According to Zhang Bo, the first step is that the surrounding environment of the ship will be cleared as it is covered with two-meter-thick silt and sits at 20 meters below sea level. The second step is that stakes will be rammed into the seabed and the ship covered with a huge box with the bottom sealed. Following this, the box will be slowly moved on board a 4,000-ton ship, which will be specially built for the salvage in May 2006.
A first for me, I spent an interesting, if very wet, afternoon canvassing for the Greens for the Camden Council election, coming up in May. I previously only had a very vague idea what canvassing meant, but, for these purposes anyway, it meant collecting names of people who would or might vote Green, for further targetting.
So it meant ringing lots of door-bells to no reaction, and occasionally a reaction, and pleasantly often a positive one. (And I didn’t get yelled at once, which surprised me a little.) Since these were mostly Victorian four-storey terraces converted to flats, it also meant lots of shouted conversations up to third-floor windows – not entirely easy when the rain is falling your eyes.
And it was eye-opening just how many ranges of lives were being lived in one overtly middle-class street, from old people in extremely dilapidated conditions, one of whom would only conduct a shouted conversation through the door (I suppose a good effect of “watch out for sneak thieves” campaigns), to a South Asian family in which a ten-year-old was the only one who spoke English.
The doors were telling. From new, cheap double glazing, to battered original, to neatly and expensively restored etched glass (one of the few terraces that was still one house) – you could write a thesis on what was likely to be found behind each.
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