London: Victorian Babylon

BOOK REVIEWS Victorian narrative pictures, I certainly wish I could see them better. The book's major flaw is not the fault of Professor Flint but of Cambridge University Press. The Victorians and the Visual Imagination has been produced on heavy slick paper with generous margins (and an awkward shape), which not only makes it almost impossible for someone without large hands and muscular forearms to hold the book in a comfortable position for reading but also raises the price to $74.95. Yet even so, many of the black-and-white illustrations, especially the photographs of those overcrowded genre paintings whose details are so important, are too muddy for us to see the distant objects or bits of background that contribute to Flint's interpretive reading. I understand that color reproductions would put the price completely out of reach, but the compromise made here by the press is pretty unsatisfactory. The price is particularly unfortunate because this is a book many people would like to own so they can reread some of the more intensely rich chapters or reach for a particular section as mental stimulation before heading off to class. The work Flint has undertaken is not nearly so simple as showing the connections between narrative painting and narrative fiction (though she does that too). Her demonstration of the interplay between art critics' ways of seeing visual representations and the techniques people in literature use to interpret poetry and fiction has, I think, provided new tools for all of us. And—as always in a book of Kate Flint's—the bibliography is simply extraordinary. Sally Mitchell Temple University London: Victorian Babylon Lynda Nead. Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. 251 pp. $35.00 LYNDA NEAD has done an enormous amount of research into original sources and found wonderful illustrations for her topics: engravings taken from the London Illustrated News, watercolors, old maps, covers of sheet music. Her chapter titles are sufficiently intriguing ; a selection: "Maps and Sewers," "Great Victorian Ways" (plans for better transportation), "A Narrative of Footsteps," "Daylight by Night" (the effects of gas lighting), "Cremorne Pleasure Gardens" (about which one is happy to know more), "From Alleys to Courts: Obscenity and the Mapping of Mid-Victorian London." But nevertheless, most readers are likely to find the volume unsatisfying—for several reasons. 79 ELT 45 : 1 2002 To begin, perhaps one shouldn't cavil too much at a book's title, but in this case, the title is especially poorly chosen. The "Babylon" of the title, taken from a Temple Bar article of 1862 in praise of London, indeed works well: the name Babylon evokes an ambiguous splendor. But who would know even from the title as a whole that the volume is focused on just 15 years of the Victorian period, 1855-1870? And who would guess that the central burden of the volume is the tension between past and present in the transition from old buildings, modes of transportation, and customs to new during that period? The date 1855 is meaningfully chosen; that is the date of the founding of the Metropolitan Board of Works which was given responsibility for addressing many of London's ills. Nead is very good in pointing out that the building of the desperately needed great sewer system, the construction of the first underground railway in London, the straightening of streets, and the demolition of unsavory slums also meant struggles between conflicting vested interests, the destruction of buildings of real historical interest, the loss of shelter (however awful) for the very poor, and immense disruption of the life of Londoners who constantly found streets dug up or blocked and old landmarks demolished. Thus, for example , while many readers interested in the Victorian period will know Joseph Bazalgette's name and his great work in building an effective sewer system, few are likely to have given thought to the disruption and indeed chaos created by the carrying out of his plans. However, too often one has the sense that Nead's treatment lacks focus , and worse, that she shares the common poststructuralist tendencies toward the pretentious statement of discoveries of...