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Reviewed by:
  • The Thames
  • Susan D. Pennybacker (bio)
The Thames, by Jonathan Schneer; pp. viii + 330. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005, $35.00, £18.99.

The river Thames drowns any single historian. Its dark waters, rich banks, and fabled onlookers readily prompt the reader toward dissatisfaction with a single narrative. One privately reads in vain for the river that one alone knows, searching for traces of intimates best-remembered somewhere very near the river—that bridge, that train passing over, that day spent walking, that precious or devastating conversation on the Embankment, terraced steps, or towpath. Even the Thames's conventional histories are briefly known to anyone who casually encounters Jonathan Schneer's very enjoyable volume. From Roman villas to Docklands's towers, most visitors to London and certainly those who live there will recognize the iconography and the personalities celebrated anew in The Thames, while simultaneously recalling a story that is not told by Schneer. This all makes The Thames a rather wistful, sighing read—an elixir of nostalgia and unrequited memory. A perfect gift for the contemporary Anglophile and first-time London traveler, its purposes are also scholarly. The mid-eighteenth-century fireworks display that graces its lovely dust jacket gives little hint of Schneer's argument, but it is there nonetheless.

Schneer has long known his friend the Thames. As a historian of the early dockside labor movement and its leader Ben Tillett, and as a more recent surveyor of London's imperial zeitgeist around 1900, he is a lover of the waters that have sustained his research. The Thames claims passion where it cannot claim comprehensiveness or fairness. It rambles amiably from the dawn of geological formation to the gentrification of the Thatcher-Major years of gated corporate and riverside renewal that set veteran Eastenders' hearts on fire for the last time. Royals and commoners alike emerge throughout the volume, all engaged with the river. The Victorians merit a chapter on William Morris and his beloved Kelmscott Manor. Stunning color prints of J. M. W. Turner's works and Stanley Spencer's wonderful, didactic parables accompany the volume. From Runnymede to the Blitz, there is much to please the aficionado whether taste extends to the estuary, the metropolis, or the shires. The book's power is in its associative aesthetic, and the stories are so vividly told that we will not forget them.

But whither the scholar? Schneer leaves his gown in the cloakroom to return not simply to the halcyon days before the multinational corporations invaded East London, but to a bygone historiography. The Manichean worlds of serf and lord, working and employing classes who never the twain shall meet, explorer and empire, righteous war and the "winds of change that made decolonization inevitable" are revived and reinvigorated (238). Readers of The Thames are spared the thorny territory of recent historical debate. "New unionism" is breathed new life even after years of struggle for the docker's tanner to be understood as one that isolated the poorest and failed seriously to deliver for the strikers of 1889. The East End is reestablished as a communitarian zone of working-class solidity untroubled by the historians of popular conservatism or domestic strife. Both the traditions of inquiry pioneered by E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm among others, are liberated from the stacks, unobstructed by meddlesome critics. Schneer writes confidently of the turn of the nineteenth century as "years of industrial revolution, of agricultural enclosure, of the slow but inexorable eradication of what historians have termed the moral (or pre-capitalist) [End Page 698] economy" (86). In essence, this is an old-fashioned socialist-humanist account of English history, comfortably fixed in a 1960s and early 1970s cheerful, progressive antiquarianism that chooses class hierarchy shorn of race or gender as its chief category, and national identity and worker solidarity as unifying principles. Slavery disappears in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the Empire brings "exotic goods" to the port (18). The fascinating Nore mutiny of 1797, impeccably chronicled, is explained as a precursor of the next levels of consciousness, "a vague reaching towards some different and more humane arrangement of society, nostalgia for a...

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