Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern by James Vernon (review)

Historians who bothered to think about modernity almost always used to follow Weber in closely associating it with disenchantment.¹ Lately, however, some historians have grown disenchanted with disenchantment. First Michael Saler recounted the rise of “modern enchantment” in As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary PreHistory of Virtual Reality (New York, 2012), detailing the substantive social and cultural roles played by fantasy during the last century. Now Vernon argues that the bureaucratic means for keeping “distant strangers” connected with each other “did not lead to the disenchantment of the modern world,” because they consistently “catalyzed . . . a reanimation of the local and the personal” (xi). In the process, he promises a riposte, on the one hand, to monocausal histories of modernization and, on the other hand, to the trend toward microhistory. The result, though less than the sum of its parts, amounts to a rewarding retelling of nineteenth-century British history, spanning society, politics, economics, and the public sphere. His book is full of new insights that will be valuable to college lecturers and curious non-specialists alike.

The theme that holds the book together is the claim that the many late Victorian occasions for “the local and the personal,” which are usually read as signs of a peculiarly British fondness for tradition, were in fact responses to the stresses imposed by modern institutions. Vernon starts with the premise that Britain’s unprecedented population growth throughout the course of the nineteenth century created a “society of strangers” (18). Numerous institutions evolved to enable interaction under these new conditions, including more inclusive schools, the census, the post office, political parties, a national press, and a formalized monetary system, all of which prompted people to transfer their trust from people to things and numbers. Countervailing the resulting tendency toward alienation, he claims, a second set of institutions emerged to re-introduce opportunities for personal interaction: the “separate sphere” of family life, the preservation of elite hierarchies, the revival of the monarchy, and paternalist company managers.

None of this narrative will strike British historians (or many other historians) as particularly new, but Vernon usefully connects the various components together, and he makes at least some effort to locate them in the context of imperial history. Hence, he cleverly refers to the continued importance of local government within Britain as a subset of the policy of “indirect rule” that prevailed throughout much of is empire.

Vernon pitches Distant Strangers as a work of historical synthesis, and in most cases, he succeeds in drawing from a sufficient body of recent work in modern British history to qualify his book as a solid overview of that field. In another sense, however, his book summarizes his own work during the last twenty years, as well as that of his many past and present students, whom he liberally cites. His chapter “A Society of Strangers,” for example, draws heavily on insights that he first offered in Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), and his chapter on civil society similarly echoes his arguments in Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture (New York, 1993). In each of these earlier monographs, as in Distant Strangers, Vernon emphasized the resilience of the personal dimension in the face of modern institutions. In Distant Strangers, he makes a stronger plea that focusing on this response mechanism to modernity might pay dividends for historians studying other parts of the world. As he puts it, modernity is “plural in cause and singular in condition” (133).

By taking Britain as his case for examining “the reinvention of local and personal relations” (128), however, he has selected an easy rather than a hard case, since Britons were so adept at adapting to modernity that they emerged as one of the least modern Western societies. If what it means to be modern is deference to Oxbridge-educated civil servants, justices of the peace, and the queen, modernity is indeed an extraordinarily contingent condition. It remains to be seen what...