Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867, and: 'More than Mere Amusement': Working-class Women's Leisure in England, 1750-1914, and: The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (review)

In contrasting but overlapping ways, two of the three books under review draw attention to key preoccupations among British social and cultural historians at the turn of the millennium. The third is a reprint of a classic work first published in 1977. It is certainly very useful to have Wohl’s The Eternal Slum in print again, and one bookselling website confirms this by pricing the new edition twenty dollars cheaper than a second-hand copy; but author and publishers, in whatever combination, have missed an opportunity. This is a pioneering study, based on very thorough archival research, of the housing problem in Victorian London. Its focus is on the reconstruction of social conditions, on the economic circumstances that gave rise to them, and on the role of charity, local government and the state in seeking to ameliorate them, bringing out the enduring tensions between laissez-faire assumptions, moral outrage and practical necessity. This is a splendid example of an excellent piece of social history with a compelling set of contemporary messages (more so in the England of 2002 than that of 1977, after the ruinous interlude of the Thatcher and Major years). But it has been reissued exactly as originally published. No account has been taken of the array of studies that appeared in its wake, extending the agenda and developing these and cognate fields. It would have been fascinating to read Wohl’s reflections on this rich historiography, commenting on (for example) the overviews of housing history by Daunton and Rodger, the great panoramic London histories by Sheppard, Inwood and (especially) Roy Porter, Olsen on the building of Victorian London, Muthesius on the terraced house, J.A. Yelling on slum clearance, Jennifer Davis and Jerry White (among others) on particular ‘slum’ districts, Martin Gaskell and Alan Mayne on the concept of the slum, Bill Luckin and others on the Thames, Peter Brimblecombe on atmospheric pollution (along with the rise of urban environmental history more generally), Ellen Ross and Anna Davin on women’s family and working lives, children and survival strategies, or Judith Walkowitz and Lynda Nead on the gendered perils and pleasures of the Victorian metropolis. Many other names might be added, and we must not forget Wohl’s own successor volume, Endangered lives, with its focus on public health in London; but there is not even an updated bibliography. Wohl’s reflections on these themes would have set his own great book in context, communicating a sense of how things had moved on and where they might go next. Without such an enhancement, this is just another reprint.

This roll-call of work on Wohl-related themes over the last quarter-century helps to provide a context for the two new books. Wohl’s main concerns can be summarised as social pathology, public health and political intervention (local and national) in Victorian England. These themes are still with us, but they tend to be tackled from angles that were only just becoming available in the late 1970s: gender, leisure and sport being among the most prominent. Catriona Parratt’s book is a case in point. Her survey of working-class women and leisure in England during the ‘long’ industrial revolution moves clearly and sensibly into a yawning gap in the existing literature. Its timeliness is underlined by the way in which it meets Claire Langhamer’s Women’s leisure in England 1920–1960 (Manchester, 2000) end-on, although...