It is striking how many aspects of modern urban life that we take for granted originated in Victorian London, from underground trains, to regular traffic patterns, to housing projects. In her latest book about London, Liza Picard details these and other developments between 1840 and 1870, and her story, one of daily life, is rewardingly evocative of the sights, sounds, and smells of the period. Picard's style is anecdotal, and she provides a plethora of facts that may at first seem random but in the end leave the reader with a satisfyingly extensive vision of Victorian London. Picard describes details of the houses, streets, clothing, and food of everyday urban existence. She delves into the practicalities of garbage collection, traffic control, sewers, and parks. She is sensitive to class differences and includes fascinating details about money, consumption, and jobs. Many of the chapters are focused on material aspects of life: “Smells,” “The Streets,” “The Railways,” The River,” “Food,” “Houses and Gardens.” Other chapters are organized not around questions of physical surroundings but around issues such as education, health, entertainment, religion, and crime. Picard's sources include guidebooks, advice books, letters, diaries, sociological and statistical accounts, and the records of institutions.

Picard's focus is on the social history of everyday life, but the silent actor behind the story of nineteenth-century London's dramatic development is industrialization. While London was not known as an industrial city in the way that Manchester or Sheffield was, new technologies of transportation, communication, and production placed London at the center of a national and worldwide commercial empire that was operating on a new scale. As a result, London underwent not only rapid growth but extraordinary physical and social reorganization. The building of railways destroyed old neighborhoods and irrevocably altered economic and social life, municipal- and government-sponsored projects included the construction of sewers and the clearance of slums, and new patterns of trade and production altered the everyday activities of both working people and consumers in countless ways. The story is one of innovation and genius and at the same time one of poverty and hardship. The Victorians’ ability to address the challenges of modern life in radical and brilliant ways and to take pride in their own achievements and display them to the world as they did at the Great Exhibition—the “event of the century,” as Picard says (213)—is a source of constant amazement. Yet Picard is careful to remind us that their inventions did not have positive effects for everyone, and London was, more than anything else, a city of diversity and extremes.

Picard's style is descriptive rather than analytic or theoretical. Each chapter jumps immediately into the topic at hand, which both keeps the pages turning and is an efficient method for condensing an immense amount of material into a reasonably sized book. But it leaves the reader who is looking for a clear point to each chapter a bit disappointed. Likewise, the reader might miss an introduction and conclusion for the book as a whole (there is a brief preface that addresses questions of sources, but little else). In the end the more abstract questions that the sources raise are left unanswered: Was the story of London's transformation one of government and/or municipal centralization? How did that process work? Is there a single narrative of development to be told about the period 1840–70? Picard's book is clearly a social snapshot rather than an account of change.

The success of the book lies in its sustained and thorough focus on London itself, and Picard's expertise about the city is evident (she has also written books about Elizabethan, Restoration, and eighteenth-century London). But if Picard is a skilled historian of London, the inevitable downside is that she is not a historian of Victorian Britain. A problem with the book is that it removes London from its larger context of British and international urban history at the very moment when London was in fact more connected than ever before to the rest of Britain and the world. London's relationship with the empire is largely invisible in Picard's narrative, and even within the metropolitan context a reader may come away with the misleading assumption that London was the only innovator during the period, when in fact cities such as Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham, and Liverpool were hazarding many of the solutions to new urban problems and challenges. It is in chapters about such topics as public health, religion, education, and women's issues that the national context is an especially noticeable lack, if only because nineteenth-century discussions of these subjects were national ones involving dialogue between people in different places. As an example, in her chapter on crime and punishments Picard says almost nothing about the public debate over prison reform, and it is difficult to understand the development of London's prisons without such a wider context. Picard's approach makes London appear to have developed in a vacuum and again raises questions rather than gives answers. Where were the new strategies of coping with urban change originating, and how can we situate London within a broader story of urban development?

Yet despite these problems, Victorian London involves careful research and synthesis of innumerable fascinating aspects of daily life, and it can serve as an excellent reference in which to discover all those details of food, clothing, money, and other things that come up when we are reading Victorian sources. The political and intellectual context may be missing from Picard's book, but in other ways this is social history at its best: readable, thorough, and interesting. Picard has provided a useful and vivid description of everyday life in Victorian London.