Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London by Judith Walkowitz (review)

In her latest book, Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London, Judith Walkowitz offers a rich account of metropolitan life in the decades between 1890 and 1950. Underpinning this study is the concept of cosmopolitanism as an intellectual programme as well as a series of cultural, commercial and political experiences shared by Soho’s diverse migrant communities, intellectual habitués and visiting social elites. Nights Out employs a similar methodology to that of Walkowitz’s 1992 study, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, which delves into the city’s cultural underbelly. It is a chronological continuation, linking Victorian London’s melting pot of class, gender, racial, moral and political tensions to the issues underpinning urban cosmopolitanism in the twentieth century.

Nights Out is structured thematically as well as chronologically. Each chapter is a unique vignette of cosmopolitanism in its varied forms and is constructed from a vast collection of unusual sources including the popular press, fiction, memoirs, criminal records, census data, visual artefacts and oral histories. Each vignette demonstrates how Soho became the place in which English cosmopolitanism evolved and was sustained, making this quarter of central London a risqué and exotic site of danger and excitement. Walkowitz captivates readers with accounts of Maud Allan’s graceful gyrations across the stage of the Palace Theatre in the early 1900s and entices them with the glitter of Quo Vadis and the avant-garde culture embraced by the Grub Group during the interwar years. Such a localised study risks becoming insular in focus, conceptualising Soho as a unique space removed from the rest of London, Europe and the British Empire. Yet Walkowitz is able to demonstrate how forms of political and cultural expression in Soho were linked to wider concerns over race and empire. Behind each vignette is a much more complex story of the competing political, cultural and ideological forces that characterised cosmopolitan life. Allan’s provocative performances of Salome and her embodiment of the modern kinetic female body, along with the suspected sapphic perversions of her female followers, stimulated wider wartime anxieties over the health of the nation and the race. Similarly, in chapter three the experiences of Italian émigrés, Peppino Leoni and Emidio Recchioni, are used to expertly demonstrate the relationships between diners, entrepreneurs and political activists as well as the interplay of unionism, anti-German sentiment, fascism and anti-fascism and their effects upon Soho’s Italian restaurant scene.

Soho’s cosmopolitanism is presented as a series of sensory experiences, whether through the physicality and sexuality of Allan and the entertainment offered at the Empire Theatre, through the smells and tastes of the café culture embraced by affluent Londoners and struggling artists alike, or through the various commodities sold to working-class women in the Berwick Street Market in the interwar years. Walkowitz demonstrates how residents and visitors negotiated this commercialised, sexualised and politicised bohemian space. Yet her representation of Soho as culturally and politically multidimensional makes her search for archetypal experiences difficult. The disproportionate attention given to the experiences of notable individuals raises questions about how widely such experiences were shared by the local and itinerant communities of Soho. There is little sense in some chapters of how the average resident or visitor experienced cosmopolitanism.

For example, much attention is given to the life and political ideology of the social purity campaigner, Laura Chant. Walkowitz critiques her representation in the press and documents her various confrontations with other such notable figures as Winston Churchill. Yet comparatively little attention is given to the experiences of the performers and prostitutes who worked at the Empire Theatre in the 1890s. Nights Out addresses attitudes towards performers like the trapeze artist whose physique and physical skill represented, at least for Chant, healthy womanhood. But little attention is given to the individual experiences of such colourful characters. How did they experience life in Soho? The trapeze artist becomes a symbol of Chant’s political and gender ideals rather than an autonomous participant in...