Brunel: The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (review)

Writing the biography of a national icon is never going to be without problems. Angus Buchanan is clear about the constraints within which he works; what else besides Robert Howlett's "Brunel in Chains" could have adorned the dust jacket? There is not much new in the way of source material, so the novelty this volume offers—besides a conscientious citation of references—is a thematic arrangement, focusing especially on the more neglected parts of Brunel's life and work.

Brunel emerges, predictably, as the swaggering figure in Howlett's image, a visionary untroubled by self-doubt and with the energy to work sometimes twenty hours a day. Buchanan is specific about his innovations in railways and other fields, offering a sensibly balanced view. Far from being an outstanding steam engineer, Brunel relied at times on Daniel Gooch and Robert Stephenson to rescue the Great Western Railway, a rough ride in both senses, upon which he only narrowly retained his seat.

Reflecting his own expert knowledge of Brunel's surviving works in the West Country, one of the themes on which Buchanan focuses is the relationship between Brunel and Bristol. While never a Bristol man, Brunel contributed largely to the port's revival during the 1830s, particularly through his diplomatic dealings with warring political factions that disagreed on the city's future. Buchanan also deals with Brunel's disasters, an astonishingly long list, though some might more accurately be labeled failures or mistakes. The blunders and financial miscalculations, showing Brunel as an inveterate risk taker, are surely part of his wide appeal. The man came more than once within a hair's breadth of killing himself through his engineering exploits, the resulting aura of resilience making his early death more shocking still.

The Great Eastern, close to an epic disaster in her own right, merits a full chapter. Here in a nutshell is a story boasting all the classic features of major Victorian engineering projects: feuding yet mutually dependent engineers, financial pressures, stresses emanating from an overexcited general public, and above all the impossibility of dealing with the minutiae of a vast new technological system without neglecting some vital component. In the case of The Great Eastern, a faulty stopcock led to an explosion that killed five stokers on her maiden voyage, and other problems emanated from a failure to lay down clear chains of command in the absence of Brunel himself.

Buchanan goes into some detail about Brunel's overseas work, in Ireland, Italy, India, and Australia, which—curiously, considering the sources available—had been largely disregarded by other biographers. Problems with payments and difficulty dealing with railway promoters apparently led to a withdrawal from Italy in 1848. Similar issues are addressed in the book's most interesting and original chapter, titled "The Professional Man" and covering Brunel's relationships with fellow engineers, clients, employees, pupils, and professional institutions.

The chosen format allows adequate scope for the pursuit of such themes, but it also means that the life story is chronologically disjointed and repetitious, a serious drawback in a biography, particularly one priced and illustrated to attract a general readership. Brunel's development as an engineer—the breadth, and maybe depth, of activity in his life at any point—is not really apparent. After the remarkable two years, 1833-35, in which Brunel made his name, his life falls into three periods: the building of his consultancy, then a heyday between 1844 and 1853 when his commitments multiplied, and his last years, when preoccupation with the great ship brought a shocking deterioration in health, made plain in photographs reproduced here.

These different phases, while identified in summary, fail to come alive, and it is consequently difficult to appreciate the scale of the engineer's achievement. A setting that might have provided the most useful context for this particular life...