The Making of Modernity

The great strength of James Vernon’s Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern is its subject matter. At its heart the book seeks to consider a question that has been strangely neglected in recent years: what is modernity, and why did it occur in Britain when it did? While these large questions garnered considerable scholarly attention in the middle of the twentieth century, with the emergence of modernization theory and its concomitant optimism about the possibility of progress in the developing world, modernity has largely ceased to be a problem or category that engages historians. The idea of the medieval, early modern, and modern structures our teaching syllabi, our departments and hiring strategies, our publishing landscape; yet what is this “modern,” and where should the line between it and its “early modern” neighbor be drawn? For many years now, we have become accustomed to simply accepting that Britain became modern at some point between the eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth without worrying too much about what is meant by such a claim. In turning the spotlight on this apparently simple question, Distant Strangers forces us to rethink a historical commonplace.

In a short, well-written, and elegant book, Vernon asks us to ponder the nature of this transformation through four core chapters on population, government, politics, and the economy. With its graceful prose, fascinating examples, and original connections, Distant Strangers makes for a satisfying and thought-provoking read.

Vernon’s thematic analysis of modernity starts with a chapter on population change, which he sees as the cornerstone upon which modernization was built. Part of the story here involves sheer growth: Britain’s population quadrupled in size between 1750 and 1900, with the lion’s share of that growth concentrated in the second half of the nineteenth century. This may not seem significant from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, but was unprecedented in its own time. And it was not just growth, of course. Fast-growing populations tend to be young and mobile, and Britain’s was no exception. As the population grew, it increasingly settled in new urban centers. London grew at a galloping pace, but so did many other large- and mediumsized towns, particularly those close to the coal fields. Between 1801 and 1931, the size of Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast, and more than a dozen other towns increased tenfold, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain had already ceased to be a rural society with almost half of its people living in towns of more than 5,000 souls. Connected with the growth of cities was the emergence of a new form of high-speed travel: the railway. The trip from London to York took four days in the eighteenth century; by the 1850s that journey could be undertaken by train in just eight hours. Though originally conceived as a means of transporting goods, the railways were soon busy exploiting the unanticipated appetite for human travel. This not only fed into new patterns of communication, but also helped to create and normalize a new social experience, that of living in communities so large that most of their inhabitants were unknowable to any given individual. Ever more British people found themselves living in what Vernon describes as a “society of strangers” (7).

As Vernon points out, life in the modern city was different from anything that preceded it. And the nineteenth century provides ample evidence of cultural commentators seeking to make sense of this new form of society. A new genre of literature advising readers how to navigate the city, artwork depicting city life, the investigative journalism of Henry Mayhew, and the emergent social science of Charles Booth and others were all, Vernon contends, different cultural responses to living in a society of strangers. This opening chapter concludes with the neat observation that just as communities became larger and more impersonal, so families became smaller and more private, and the individual’s sense of self more acute.

The next chapter turns to governance and draws attention to a number of features of the modern state which distinguish it from the traditional...