Volume 53, Number 8 · May 11, 2006
City Lights
By John Brewer
Building Jerusalem:The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City
by Tristram Hunt
Metropolitan, 576 pp., $32.50
Tristram Hunt's Building Jerusalem is an erudite and elegant account of the rise and fall of the Victorian city, and an eloquent plea for the return of the pride and civic consciousness that he sees as the great achievement of those who shaped urban life in nineteenth-century Britain. Its focus, then, is resolutely British—its territory the Manchester of Engels, the London of Dickens and Mayhew, and the Birmingham of Joseph Chamberlain—but its larger polemic contributes to the debate about the way we live now. It urges us to use the Victorian achievement in order to tackle concerns about contemporary anomie, privacy, and 'social disengagement' expressed in works like Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone of 2000, and to reinforce the attack on modernist urban planning and the triumph of suburbanization embodied in the 'sidewalk' school of criticism begun in the 1960s by Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The notion that a dose of Victorian values offers a cure to the ailments of postmodern urban living may seem counterintuitive, not to say unpalatable—and certainly there are times when Hunt sounds like the Victorian doctor telling his patient that he should swallow the medicine for his own good—but he pleads eloquently for us to learn from the experience of nineteenth-century Britain. The historical picture he presents is well executed but also quite familiar. The novelty of Building Jerusalem lies in its contemporary polemical edge, and its success stands or falls by the effectiveness of the link it posits between past experience and present-day policy.
Review, 4722 words
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