The political history of the nineteenth-century city has progressed through a number of manifestations since the 1950s, from Whiggish admiration for the triumph of urban sanitary reform, through analysis of class structure and conflict, to an emphasis on the diffuse nature of power implied by the term governance. These very British traditions have recently been challenged by a cultural approach to politics and the city informed by theory and methods drawn from English literature and heavily influenced by European intellectuals such as Foucault, Baudelaire and Simmel. Particularly strong in the United States, these works are often naively enthusiastic to demonstrate the existence of Benthamite panoptic technologies of control, flâneurs traversing the city to observe and enjoy its pleasurable manifestations and a new and unproblematically unified middle class remaking the city in their own form. Though demonstrably informed by cultural history approaches and concerns, Chris Otter's interesting text challenges these conventional tropes of the genre in his attempt to explain how vision and light were transformed for the Victorian urban dweller.

Following a largely unhelpful and sometimes irrelevant introduction, the book proceeds through six chapters mainly focused on examining the technologies of light in the context of mainstream liberal thought and practice. The scene is set by an examination of Victorian understanding of the eye, optics and of ‘ways of seeing’. This emphasizes the importance of vision to the urban bourgeoisie, especially what Otter terms the ‘oligoptic’ culture of the Victorians – essentially self-regulation through the process of seeing and being seen. This concept challenges the reliance of cultural historians on both panopticism and flânerie, both of which are predicated on the invisibility of the viewer and the relative weakness of those being viewed. Subsequent chapters are much more firmly empirical, addressing, first, the way in which Victorian engineers and urban sanitarians understood light and its place in the city. This is followed by a good analysis of the culture of inspection and ‘inspectability’ which developed in the second half of the century. The second half of the book is concerned with the rise of gas lighting in domestic and public places, technical developments and the emergence of electricity as an alternative, but by no means triumphant, form of illumination. Along the way Otter makes good points about the links between light and the broader sanitary project – which often literally and metaphorically sought to open up the slums and bring in physical and intellectual light. The battle between gas and electricity is intelligently handled, challenging simplistic assumptions that the slow adoption of electric light reflected backwardness. Gas, he points out, was deeply entrenched, increasingly efficient and often more effective as a light source until after World War I.

There are some strong elements to this book and some exciting new ways of looking at the Victorian city are opened up. However, there are also some irritating weaknesses. Though the book has an extensive bibliography it contains few of the texts one might expect to find in a work addressing the politics of the urban and it makes no particular reference to the types of debates which have taken place in recent years around governance, the politics of space or the rise of the urban professional. The book would have engaged more with the interests of the readers of this journal if it had focused less on the rather arcane debates amongst cultural historians and historians of science and more with the mainstream concerns of urban historians. This is reflected in the choice of sources which come mainly from the national level. Good use is made of the technical press and general debates around how, what and why lighting technologies were or should be deployed, but aside from a few examples from London and Manchester, little use is made of operational records from the cities. The book would also have benefited from a more straightforward use of language, especially in the introduction which is very hard going and not very illuminating. Overall, this is a challenging, innovative but patchy book which provides and original approach to the inter-relationship between liberalism, technology and the Victorian city.