London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550–1750 by Robert O. Bucholz and Joseph P. Ward (review)

We have needed a textbook synthesis of the flood of work on early modern London for a long while now. So, Bucholz and Ward’s London is timely, but unlike the city it describes this book lacks shine and is rather flat and lackluster. This is partly down to a lack of interpretative threads that would give London more substance and coherence along the lines of how what were in effect late-medieval structures and concepts—guilds, government, policing, jurisdictions, citizenship, and the like—responded to and were shaped by London’s scary speedy growth, for instance, or how a more commercial-market ethos—seen in banking, shopping, advertising, water supply, and street-cleaning and lighting and so on—reconfigured what it meant to live in London, or how people from all walks of life understood growth through new strategies and reimagining their home city. Any one of these threads would have given London a stronger spine and unifying lucidity.

London is aimed at student pockets but it is too dense at times and riddled with basic errors: Bridewell did not “house orphans,” that was in the hands of the governors of Christ’s Hospital (52), there were more than four Inns of Court (54), Southwark Cathedral did not exist at this time (63), there were not “about” 120 parishes in London (71), women beggars did not tend to go door-to-door (225), the night-watch was not the “centrepiece” of policing (253), and “who [the authors ask] would oppose tearing down a brothel?” Answer: every magistrate worth his salt (280).

Even textbooks need binding arguments and I read two pages called “Themes and Arguments” (31–2) four times but could not find any. If there is one it is that London grew quickly and that it was different two centuries after 1550; the “Conclusion” is called “London in 1750”. The two “principal themes” are how migrants made ends meet and adapted to a bustling new city and that London was a “harbinger of modernity” (31). London “catalyze[d] modernity” (3) with “institutions and attitudes that cannot help but strike us as modern” (11).

Modernity is not the only complex category that is treated uncritically (public sphere is another), but the authors it seems want a modern-looking city as their hero and they sound a little like Boris Johnson or 1940 Blitz-talk: they celebrate a “brave new London” (163), “the music of cockney speech” (41), and “that combination of proud humility, recalcitrant loyalty, and spirited resilience known to all the world as the Londoner” (31). London’s last sentence tells us that Londoners are “tough,” “smart,” “entrepreneurial,” funny, and “the glory” of the world (367). Johnsonian, indeed (the 2013 one) and overdone therefore with warped embellishment: the Londoner, for instance, is not “the glory of the world,” and do the rest of the world really think that Londoners are humble, loyal, and resilient? Why write this?

I understand why a flamboyant mayor or a chipper cockney enduring bombing night after night might use embroidered words, but this ill-advised stab at popular history is out of place. Equally jarring are the coffee-table mode walks the authors take through the city in 1550 and 1750—disguised as hard-up “inquisitive scholars”—remarking on what they see: St. Paul’s rose “majestically like a great ship” (341), and the pair turn “sadly away” from Newgate Prison (51), exit Bedlam “with relief back into the street” (340), munch pies (341), and walk swiftly past Bridewell “making a note to avoid incarceration in this social experiment” (53). The conclusion, in a nutshell, is that there were more things to see in 1750.

This said, it is handy to have any sort of synthesis bringing past London into manageable shape in chapters on the socioeconomic base, royal and civic London, fine and performing arts, the public sphere and popular culture, people on the...