In this ambitious study, Joseph De Sapio investigates the “tourist gaze,” to use John Urry's term, as an agent of global cultural identity in London during the second half of the nineteenth century. In doing so, he illuminates the urban character of modernity. His four main chapters examine tourist responses to the metropolis from a number of countries and identity groups: imperial and colonial, North American, domestic, and continental. From about 1850, London, already at the center of a vast industrial and imperial network, overtook Paris as the tourist capital of Europe. The Franco-Prussian War (1870) and the Commune (1871) forced Paris off the tourist map; continental and imperial tourists had to look elsewhere for their European experience. Tourists from “home” (a loaded term for Dominion visitors) and abroad brought with them a mixture of admiration and rivalry, seeking confirmation of their own cultural modernities in their image of London, although London could also encourage anti-modern discourses, creating a dialectical relationship between modernity and tradition, the urban and anti-urban. Tourists were uniquely placed to see how London “reconcile[s] and integrate[s] competing modernities” under the sign of industrial change (151). Moreover, tourist accounts combined these varied contexts in “narrative form” that investigated modernity itself (16), engaging in a “personal dialogue” with the metropolis that went beyond conventional tourist exchanges.

Imperial tourists regarded London as the home of the “imperial family,” and their quest went beyond a mere search for identity; rather, they sought “to understand their place in a rapidly shifting world of technological and social progress” (26). In chapter 1, De Sapio compares imperial with colonial investment in the capital. While travelers from Australia, Canada, and New Zealand tended to position themselves as dual citizens, they contrasted Britain's sense of the past with their countries' lack of visible heritage. Landmarks such as Westminster Abbey, along with sentimental attachment to monarchy, nonetheless offered reassuring symbols of the Empire's longevity and power—an inspiration for future generations back home. Indian and Asian colonial subjects responded rather differently. Military and diplomatic relationships, often class based, meant that Indian visitors traveled to England for particular networking purposes and for social advancement. Under these conditions, Indian visitors found their home culture validated by patronage. But De Sapio argues that the imperial relationship to modernity reversed that found in the dominions. Looking to Britain to initiate progress rather than regarding themselves as partners in the Empire's global project, South Asians (as per their tourist experience) understood modernity as a “display of political and martial dominance” and an exclusively urban phenomenon (45).

For the American tourist (chapter 2), London played a more “instructive” role and could be seen as a rival in the game of industrial modernity, global power, and wealth. De Sapio notes that while transatlantic travel expanded, it became less affordable. The tourist class tended to be solidly bourgeois and, more importantly, belong to the “public class” of intelligentsia, civil servants, and other arbiters of public taste and opinion. While many traveled to fulfil long-standing desires to see the Old World, American tourists until the last quarter of the nineteenth century had mixed feelings about what they found. Americans felt that Britain was a nation in decline, too attached to hidebound institutions such as the monarchy. Britain supplied the rich imperial history that their own culture lacked, though to be sure, sights such as the Tower of London reconciled Americans to their own, more progressive society. De Sapio comments on how frequently American tourists associated the Tower with its female prisoners, thus relating gender to civilization (67). On the other hand, American tourists (particularly after the 1870s) were genuinely fascinated by British history and literature: De Sapio emphasises the importance of literary motivations for traveling, and how they reinforced the tourist's sense of “a shared Anglo-Saxon heritage” (77). London also offered Americans the chance to reflect on their understanding of modernity, both industrial and social, and their own emerging position as a superpower.

For the domestic tourist, London's fabric weaves the dialogue between modernity and traditionalism into “the city's physical fabric” (86). The famous sights were of less importance than the knowledge that London was the epicenter of national history. Yet, despite the capital's dirty air and streets, London's reorganized public spaces celebrated consumerism as well as industry; teashops and restaurants catered increasingly to women and made the relationship between public and private “permeable.” In chapter 3 De Sapio argues convincingly for gendered modernity; confirmed in its “supremacy . . . in national life” (114), London also displays women's changing status. Continental visitors (De Sapio focuses on visitors from Paris and Berlin in chapter 4) were less able to reconcile their versions of modernity with what they found in the metropolis, and their testimonies reveal that they often experienced London with unease. To be sure, continental visitors could distinguish much more clearly than the British between industrial and social modernity, although they sometimes misread London's service economy for large-scale industrialism (conversely, for the British tourist, only industrial and technological progress constituted genuine modernity). Put another way, a dialectical relationship between modernities informs the tourist perception: as London transformed itself through production and spectacle, so did the terms by which it was judged.

De Sapio's dialectical approach creates a series of dialogues between modernity and traditionalism (also between modes of modernity), between contested identities (imperial, colonial, continental), between nostalgia and progress, and between the tourist's reflective gestures of seeing and being seen. But he also investigates the uses of imperial travel—how knowledge acquired on tour could modify and influence their own society. The new grand tour to England (ironically reversing earlier patterns) was essential for South Asians' social and political advancement, yet the visitors' investment in London would seem to ensure that they remain lodged firmly in the empire's shared cultural outlook. As well as reconciling modernities, travel could also expand “tension between modernity and traditionalism into a global phenomenon” (51). De Sapio's complex methodology occasionally leaves the reader unsure about the tourist's processes of perception and understanding; for example, the tourist both constructs knowledge “in a narrative form” (16) and creates “mental maps” (155) of situatedness. Nevertheless, this work triangulates urban systems, modernity, and the traveler in powerfully suggestive ways, and makes an important contribution to travel writing, urban studies, and histories of modernity.