Although primarily a work of literary criticism, Alan Robinson's most recent work will be of interest to historians, art historians, and literary scholars. This review considers it from a historian's perspective, and readers wishing to know more about Robinson's work as literary criticism will no doubt find more of use in other reviewers’ comments.

Robinson offers “an interpretation of how Londoners sought to make sense of the social transformations of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (xiv) through textual and visual analysis. Written work by Blake, Ruskin, Dickens, Trollope, and Henry James, as well as paintings by Whistler and others, all give an evocative account of what these figures admired, criticized, or simply noticed about the city around them, and in this he enriches our sense of how London felt or looked to observers. His specific interest lies in London imagined by the middling sort, though this of necessity takes him into discussions about middle-class envy and criticism of aristocrats, as well as middle-class fear and anxiety about the poor.

He focuses on two main themes: the role of money and the social relations that “unregulated capitalism” (xv) encouraged, and gender relations in “London's patriarchal society” (xvi). Along the way, however, he covers a broad range of subjects: the geographical reshaping of London through real estate and transportation infrastructure development; the consumption, democratization, and commodification of art; and why English painters lagged behind French impressionists in social criticism. While he engages his main themes throughout the book, it reads like a collection of loosely linked essays rather than a comprehensive survey of London cultural history.

Robinson advances several arguments. First, London was a “post-traditional society” (xv) in this period, by which he means that the certainty of knowing another's status, the meaning and value of art, or the meaning of the city itself was past; with no “indisputable cultural authority” (xv), citizens lay adrift in a rapidly expanding and relativistic metropolis. While true, one can quibble over his chronology. He acknowledges that some of the factors making for such widespread relativism predate the 1770s; the growth of a consumer culture certainly does, as does the reliance in financial markets on credit, speculation, and uncertain assessments of trust. One can also question how far people not actually writing social or cultural criticism at the time felt this relativism. For example, Smollett's Matt Bramble opines against urban vice and profligate consumption, using Vauxhall Gardens as a foil for antiurban polemic, but one could more than balance this against the great number of individuals attending Vauxhall who might have disagreed. Still, even if such uncertainty did not originate in this period, Robinson's range over art, literature, financial scandal, and human morality suggests that relativism pervaded the entirety of his “long nineteenth century”—as authors saw it.

Second, Robinson argues that historians’ claims of an improvement in the actual status of middle-class women underplay “the drastic financial and legal discrimination which continued to hamper women until the late nineteenth century” (xvi). Instead, he emphasizes “similarities rather than the differences between prostitution and its `respectable' counterparts: the marriage market and marital ‘coverture’” (xvi). Examining in a brief way this legal and financial discrimination, and in a more substantial exploration of several authors’ critiques of and support for existing gender roles, he concludes that “the unpalatable truth … was that in London almost all women were forced to sell themselves to men” (35). But this argument, extrapolating from truth to hyperbole, is not entirely methodologically sound. Robinson grounds his argument largely in the criticisms of marriage, and discussions of gender, by Blackstone, Blake, and mid-Victorian polemicists like W. R. Greg and J. S. Mill. Robinson insists that despite Blake's contemporary marginality, Blake's work provides insight because he developed a “wide-ranging critique of the patriarchal mentality which, significantly, coexists with gynophobic fantasies” (21). I am not sure that the presence of a contemporary critique rises to the level of an accurate description—it may lead us to consider gender roles differently but needs more than this to convince. Moreover, all of his evidence comes from avowedly polemical sources, and it seems a strange way to come at the truth of women's roles by looking at the polarities of contemporaries. A leavening of memoirs, diaries, and letters—in short, sources other than legal opinion, political theory, and literature—might give a less skewed picture.

Robinson also uses “a complementary psychoanalytic approach” (xiv) to uncover Londoners’ perceived reality. This poses several difficulties: individual authors portrayed fictional characters, and one can see them as suggestive, but hardly representative. More challenging perhaps is the idea that psychoanalysis works well at such a historical remove. For example, Robinson deploys Freudian psychology to explain male Victorians’ need to see women as either wholly good or wholly bad, and the moral double standards that ensued: heterosexual men choose women resembling their mothers to “re-enact the unresolved issues of childhood” (40). Middle-class men, idolizing their mothers, must then see “good” women as desexualized; they then learn as children to view their socially inferior nannies as legitimate sites of repressed sexual fantasies, and all working-class women ever after as well. Robinson recognizes other sources of Victorian gender roles and sexuality, such as medical knowledge that essentialized women's physiology and psychology, but the recognition does not seem to impinge on the primacy of his psychoanalytic explanation. The most unusual aspect of all this is that comprehending the morality of vast numbers of people using generalized psychoanalytic concepts only works if one treats those concepts as themselves above examination and universally applicable. One finds either assumption questionable. It does, however, make for exciting and racy portrayals. Dickens, for example, projected “repressed fantasies” (89) of defilement from his own childhood onto his fictional characters, and while this surely helps us understand those characters, and even Dickens, I am not sure what it tells us about London or other middle-class Londoners. And in discussing legal limitations on women, Robinson asserts that “ironically, the patriarchal discrimination intended to protect men against the assertive, castrating female of their fantasies succeeded only in provoking what it was intended to forestall” (209). No doubt many Victorian men, men of other eras, and perhaps even women have had just such repressed fantasies, but it does not advance us much to suppose that this was the case and then use it to explain legislation, jurisprudence, or social morality.

I have touched on only a few issues here, and historians will certainly appreciate interesting sections on cultural responses to the financial scandals of the 1850s, the commodification of art, and the sense of urban destruction and construction throughout the century. But in his attempt to generalize from the work of a relatively small number of authors to a sense of middle-class Londoners’ morality, gender roles, anxieties, and sense of the changing city, Robinson may have overreached.