Recent Work in Victorian Urban Studies

The following books are under consideration in this review:

Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London, by Lynda Nead; pp. ix + 252. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000, $35.00, £19.95.

Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display, and Identity, edited by Felix Driver and David Gilbert; pp. xvii + 283. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999, £45.00, $74.95.

Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity, by Deborah L. Parsons; pp. x + 246. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, £15.95, $22.00.

Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End, by Erika Diane Rappaport; pp. xi + 323. Princeton, NJ and London: Princeton University Press, 2000, $35.00, £21.95.

Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot, by Joseph McLaughlin; pp. xii + 240. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000, $55.00, $18.50 paper, £42.95, £14.50 paper.

You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive." Sherlock Holmes's famous remark on first meeting Doctor Watson (in London, of course) has taken on new resonance. We are readier than ever to see connections between the metropolis and its colonial extensions, readier than ever to take them seriously. Holmes could have warned us. When cities become world trade centers they also become centers of migration and risk. Watson knew this from his own experience: "I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained" (Doyle 4). The point of view is familiar, even if the vocabulary sounds dated. We still associate cities with dangerous classes, natives, and outsiders. We still make heroes of those who help us gain real or imagined safety, those who can provide a 'Sure Lock' for our homes. In important ways, Conan Doyle has written our world, our fantasies of it. If we no longer inhabit the Victorian city, the Victorian city still inhabits us.

It certainly inhabits our scholarship, in fields as diverse as anthropology, art history, economics, geography, history, and literary studies. Perhaps its appeal for scholars is precisely the demand it places on any of these disciplines to borrow from the others. This explains its importance in the development of Victorian studies, an interdisciplinary venture that from the start took the city as a perfect interdisciplinary object. We can frame this symbiosis between two publications: The Victorian City: Images and Realities, a 1973 collection based on a 1967 conference organized by Victorian Studies to celebrate the journal's tenth anniversary, and the 1999 Harvard Press English-language edition of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. Much of the urban studies of the intervening years moves between these methodological poles: the positivism of many of the Victorian Cities essays and what Hannah Arendt called the "surrealistic montage" of Benjamin's work (47). ¹ Lynda Nead remarks that Victorian Babylon owes much to Benjamin's "image of the multi- layered nature of modernity, its varied and uneven strands and its multiple levels of representation and experience" (6). The same might be said of much recent work on the nineteenth-century city.

The Benjaminian element in that work is an emphasis on streets, spectacle, fantasy, and the "uneven" emergence of modernity. The books reviewed here all might be said to regard the city as "capital of the nineteenth century," but less as a unique site than as one point of emergence for pervasive questions of personal and social meaning. They treat the city not as a microcosm but as a node, "less a centre than a crossroads" as Felix Driver and David Gilbert put it in the introduction to Imperial Cities (5). And in most of these books, the figure at that crossroads is likely to be a woman. Benjamin's flâneur has been replaced by a flâneuse. In the often-quoted words of Michel de Certeau, whose account of urban experience supplements Benjamin's in many of...