Richard Dennis' book addresses the modern city through the eyes of fictional urbanites, in various novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He uses the novels of George Gissing, John dos Passos, Virginia Woolf, Upton Sinclair, Edith Wharton and others, following their characters on urban journeys. Focusing heavily on Gissing's novels, which were often set on real streets and in real buildings, Dennis uses these as starting points to discuss the communities that existed there. ‘When George Gissing situated a character in a flat in London's Victoria Street, he was immediately indicating her status and lifestyle’ (p. 113), and indicating it in a way that resonated far more clearly with his readers of the time than with readers of today. In his journeys through the worlds of these characters, Dennis brings us discussion of the different omnibus operators in London of the 1920s, the prices of season tickets to various suburbs by rail and the social stratification represented by different types of housing. In this way he is able to harness different discussions on the nature of transport, social segregation and women's role within the new metropolis.

In focusing on London, New York and Toronto – with some digressions to discuss other cities comparatively – Dennis is drawing on extensive archival research in three countries, looking at how much these English-speaking cities have in common, as well as how their development diverged. Looking at ownership records, maps of where housing developments were built and whether they were built speculatively or by the owner, Dennis is able to tease out these differences, and highlight the social approaches that they represented. He also includes a useful discussion on the financial instruments available in different markets to potential homeowners and builders, and how housing was influenced by these factors. Some of the subjects he discusses have been analysed elsewhere, such as the development of the department store and the role of the subway, but Dennis usefully weaves these into his description of growing commuter populations, where the wives of the men working in the city would themselves travel downtown to shop – and different public transport providers marketed their services to this group. His map of the locations of New York department stores is useful in showing the shifting zones of shopping destinations, and relating these to texts describing the shopping experience. The illustrations are a great asset: as well as reproductions of artworks and advertisements for apartment buildings, Dennis has included his own photographs, maps and tables which are clear and informative. With black-and-white reproductions of nineteenth-century paintings, Dennis engages in long discussions about the community as depicted in pictures by Ford Madox Brown, Gustav Doré and others.

The book contains an interesting discussion of the human-scale experience of technology, as roadways gave over pedestrian space to motorized vehicles, and the long overlap of different forms of transport – resulting in chaotic scenes of pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, cars and, later, electric trams. Dennis discusses the evolving views of technology as the new becomes the old, and the urban landscape was lit first by gas and then electricity arrived: ‘Whereas gas created oases of light in the dark, electricity abolished the darkness. So gaslight almost created the menacing environment of mid-nineteenth-century cities: a flickering light sufficient to encourage citizens to go out, but insufficient to expose what might be lurking in the shadows’ (p. 129). The adoption of street lighting varied across the cities that are included in this study: by the 1880s, there were 1 million gas lamps in the streets of London, compared with only 27,000 in New York. Dennis describes the introduction of illuminated signs, and their increasing role in shaping the visual world of cities. Of Times Square he says ‘it was more profitable for property owners to rent out space for signs than to redevelop their land’. The role of advertising in the urban landscape of the 1920s brings to mind the description in the Great Gatsby of the billboard with moving eyes (an optician's advertisement) – this mechanical sign watching the participants of the story and serving as a landmark.

Perhaps the most useful part of the book is the discussion of the evolving attitudes and changing boundaries between public and private space. ‘Some publicly owned spaces, such as parks, were incorporated into the private sphere, redefined as safely domestic for middle-class women and children hitherto restricted to the more obviously domestic space of the private home. Public streets lost their publicness: streets designed for vehicular traffic became less conducive to social functions; and “the public” became too diverse, made up of too many “other” people for any group or for the population as a whole to feel “at home” on the streets’ (p. 115). In fact it was working-class and immigrant communities who were often criticized by middle-class observers for their promiscuous use of ‘public’ streets, treating them with their neighbours as domestic-space-in-common, somewhere to hang laundry, socialize and for children to play.

By using the lives of characters from well-known novels, Dennis is able to contextualize his study with the experience of urban life across ninety years. This is an impressive addition to works on the nature of urban communities, and useful for historians of the city. It is let down somewhat by the limited index (there is no entry for ‘pedestrians’, for instance), but that is a small flaw.