The Cambridge Urban History of Britain (review)

Britain was "the first modern urban nation" (i), declares Peter Clark, this series's general editor. The new Cambridge urban history displays both scholarly authority and comprehensiveness in its three-volume treatment of the emergence of this nation from 600 to 1950. Nearly 2,000 pages of essays, graphs, charts, maps, and images wind through the early modern and modern eras, overwhelming in sheer length and largely empirical and social- scientific in substance. No mammoth project of this type can preserve the discrete, quantitative aesthetic or the literariness of H. J. Dyos's pioneering contributions. Yet the work of Dyos and Michael Wolff, Raphael Samuel, and other luminaries casts long shadows over these pages. This is a busy, bustling, technocratic workshop of an undertaking: a state-of- the-art conjoining of conventional historical method with the pointedly numerate. Any student of the Victorian can find within these pages inspiring, well-finished data with which to bolster most arguments about cities large and small. The prestige of the undertaking, the stature of its contributors, its precision, and its prudent grounding in demonstrable "historical fact," assure its use-value as a reference work. Its strength lies in part in its general avoidance of controversial argumentation, its caution, its scope, its careful attention to structure, and its downplaying of the danger zone of human agency, even as agents and attitudes tend stubbornly to creep in. These volumes are marked by all the rigor of the project's very clear pursuit—the mapping of urban structures that functioned either as brakes upon the general course toward a more modern metropolitan urban life, a life still outstandingly and irreducibly represented by London, or indeed, as juggernauts on that path.

The eighteenth-century discussion that precedes the Victorian shows the latter's roots in what came before; the twentieth-century city evolves logically, if through fits and starts, from its Dickensian forbears. Thus the third volume's editor, Martin Daunton, fittingly sets the terms of the urban melodrama: "The language of Dickens and sanitary reformers provided imaginative force to a real and alarming crisis in British towns and cities at the opening of Victoria's reign, bringing a variety of problems together into a single frame of reference and uniting otherwise disparate issues in a way which justified action and intervention" (1). With verve, bibliographic inclusiveness, and occasional elegance, the material on the nineteenth century is rich, sustaining, and resourceful. In short, this is unquestionably the new standard edited work on the subject. By defining the "urban" broadly as the ways in which cities (mostly) solved problems over time, the volume takes an approach which boasts both heuristic merit and a distinguished tradition of scholarship.

Volume 2 begins with a set of area studies, from 1540 to 1840, that take us through the varied town and city settlements of the English regions, and into Scotland and Wales. These are rewarding and well-piloted journeys. John Walton's "North," which recalls the region that was a "symbol of the future" (111), is notable for its power. He insists upon the "formative significance" of the early modern upon the nineteenth century even as the new era brought "qualitative transformations in social relations" (131), committed to the international export of its goods. The ensuing discussion of "Urban Themes and Types" includes a breathtaking account of "Politics and Government, 1700-1840" by the fine eighteenth-century specialists, Joanna Innes and Nicholas Rogers. This inquiry into the "apparent disjuncture" (530) between administrative institutional stasis and lively and proactive cultural and social change is startling in its evidence and conclusions, a seminal and brilliant piece. Contrasting the traditional governing historical claims for reform at...