London in the Eighteenth Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing by Jerry White (review)

When a history of eighteenth-century London arrives with a ribboned bookmark sewn into its spine, readers face, at best, a book whose depth and breadth provide a definitive history of the city, or at worst, a tome of disconnected minutiae that makes a reader tired of London. Mr. White generally avoids the latter by writing an engaging, twenty-first-century urban history: a text offering not only new demographic data but also plausible interpretations that acknowledge how suspect certain data and interpretations can be. His London presents a postmodern historian at the top of his game in his respect for eighteenth-century London’s otherness, his careful correction of historical stereotypes, and his awareness of how readers beyond history departments engage with raw, historical data.

Literary critics of the early eighteenth century will find Mr. White’s history unique since it stands as the final volume of a “trilogy” that Mr. White began in 2001 with London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People and continued with London in the Nineteenth Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God (2007). Due in part to his thematic rather than chronological presentation of data, Mr. White is able to unpack the city’s “monstrous” size with a patience and clarity available only to a cultural historian who has already researched two centuries of London’s daily life. Each of his five headings (City, People, Work, Culture, and Power) offers several chapters devoted to Londoners (some famous, like James Gibbs, others not [yet], like prostitute Martha Stacey) who shape each heading. This organization precisely allows Mr. White to present a discontinuous London, a topography in upheaval, a city constantly adjusting to political and economic contingencies. In short, a city of improvisation surfaces.

This structure also allows Mr. White to avoid narratives of causation that consider eighteenth-century London important only for its traits that anticipate our modern world. It is refreshing, therefore, to be hard-pressed to find the phrase “early modern London” in Mr. White’s entire book. For Mr. White, eighteenth-century London is a different volume—not simply a chapter leading to the modern city. If there is an argument unifying the book, it is Mr. White’s interpreting Defoe’s phrase “a great and monstrous thing” to mean “a city of extremes.” These extremes (class, religion, birthplace, gender) create a divided city that Mr. White refuses to reconcile neatly. He reinforces London’s divisiveness not only to correct a Whig history of London, but also to understand what cultural effects these divisions created: “There is a great deal of truth in this characterization [of a progressive London], but a proper balance needs to be struck.” He finds that London sustained these divisions and managed their damaging or ameliorative ramifications.

Why was the early eighteenth century such a fertile time for literary clubs, assemblies, and societies? After presenting evidence of London’s migrant population, the itinerancy of urban housing, and early mortality rates, Mr. White’s answer is “association.” “To counteract the loneliness and isolation of the greatest city in Europe,” Londoners acquired an “obsessive desire to associate” and improvised networks of “friendship.” Differences that led to individual alienation, thus, generated a solution to ameliorate that division, which in turn excluded others from “the Club.” Mr. White’s focus on the cultural products of these divisions allows his book to reconsider a supposedly coherent “Age of Politeness.”

By choosing to address the entire eighteenth century, Mr. White contextualizes cultural objects that have previously been overemphasized and humbles their overdetermined claims. For Mr. White, literature is one of these cultural artifacts. He analyzes literary London in a chapter beneath the heading “Work” and posits Haywood as an emblem of what he calls the “giant industry” of print. Literary history therefore becomes a materialist history-of-the-book. Like most of Mr. White’s chapters, however, the Londoner’s biography is too...