Simon Bradley writes:

Jerry White’s epigraphs, like his subtitle, come from Blake’s Jerusalem (1804-20), but the contemporary voices in the text tend to be less unworldly. Some of them – Hazlitt, Louis Simond, Dickens, Charles Booth, Arthur Munby, ‘Walter’, Molly Hughes – are well known. Others are obscure but representative figures picked out from press reports, or nameless voices recorded from the crowds, such as the Euston Square prostitute who startled the teenage John Lane, future publisher of the Yellow Book, by asking fortuitously: ‘Johnnie darling, won’t you come home with me?’ Even when he’s not quoting directly, White’s stories and statistics are chiefly drawn from contemporary sources. Here, then, is an attempt at a fresh portrait of 19th-century London, describing its evolution from the dangerous, disease-ridden, oil-and-candlelit city that overcame the challenges of Napoleon’s blockades to the imperial capital that made war on the Boers.

(LRB 21 June 2007)

Cape | hardback 624 pp. |ISBN: 9780224062725