Simeon Koole’s Intimate Subjects is an exceptional work of sensory history, offering a new and compelling explanatory framework of London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The monograph gives due weight to the oft-overlooked sensations of everyday urban life, showing how, cumulatively, these fleeting bodily encounters articulated and informed ideas about the relationships between bodies and space or, more simply put, what it meant to exist in the world. What emerges is a kind of tactile epistemology, as Koole traces the ways touch and tactile practices shaped contemporary thought about both the individual and society at large. This is a sensitive history in more ways than one: while its primary focus is sensation and sensory perception, it is also consistently mindful of how the intersections of race, class, gender, age and disability meant that sensory encounters were experienced and interpreted differently. Poetic in its prose and fine-grained in its analysis, Intimate Subjects is a sophisticated and strongly conceptual history of the embodied past.

The book consists of five chapters, each an extended case study of a particular arena of touch and tactile practices. Chapter 1, ‘Love in the Time of Neurology’, is a deep dive into scientific theories of sensory perception, paralleling Henry Head’s self-experimentation – the surgical severance of the nerves in his hand and forearm – with the place of touch (real and imagined) in his romantic relationship with Ruth Mayhew. Chapter 2, ‘Pedagogies of Touch’, explores theories of disability and details how the development of touch was positioned as a sensory compensation for the blind and visually impaired. Chapter 3, ‘Mind the Gap’, maps the underground geographies of the London Tube and the indeterminate or improvised tactile relationships between its passengers. Chapter 4, ‘Tea Shop Touch and Global Capitalism’, places the working conditions of tea-shop waitresses in global perspective, linking those conditions to the ‘nervous hands’ of their customers and the potential for erotic or unwanted touch. Finally, Chapter 5, ‘Revelations of the London Fog’, describes how that meteorological phenomenon simultaneously obscured the city and materialized the bodies of its inhabitants, sharpening their awareness of their spatial existence in ways that translated into the legal discourse of the city’s police courts. Each chapter rests on a deep foundation of primary source material, and Koole’s reading of this remarkably diverse corpus is innovative and thorough. The inclusion of 25 images alongside the text is especially effective in emphasizing the intimacy of the tactile encounters Koole describes.

Throughout this work, Koole is attentive to the global industrial and economic forces that shaped the shifting sensory landscape of London over the course of a century. His analysis examines the sensation of touch in the aggregate, without ever losing sight of specific, individual bodily encounters. The notion of ‘entanglement’ is introduced in the opening pages and serves as a leitmotif of the book as a whole. The chapters themselves are entangled, with characters and concepts recurring throughout. Koole’s borrowing of D.H. Lawrence’s phrase ‘this cerebral age’ to denote the period 1860 to 1960 is apt: as many of his case studies illustrate, this era was characterized by an impulse to quantify and measure, to know the world through the senses, even – as Koole explains – when this knowledge could not exist independently of the bodily encounters that shaped it. Scientific or legal truths were inseparable from the embodied experiences of the scientists and magistrates who codified those truths. That historical actors were always necessarily embodied comprises one of the book’s core arguments, and serves as a valuable reminder to historians of all walks.

Although touch provides the through thread for Koole’s argument, the other senses also have a role to play; as Koole himself puts it, ‘[t]he mingling of the senses makes the history of touch one of emphasis rather than degree’ (17). However, there were moments when the interplay between the senses – how the tactile intersected or overlapped with the visual, aural or olfactory – might have been made more explicit. My personal background in historical musicology meant that I spent much of Chapter 2 – on efforts to cultivate the sense of touch in blind students – curious about the parallel place of aurality in those educational contexts (Koole mentions musical training offered by the Royal Normal College for the Blind in the chapter’s conclusion). Similarly, my reading of the section of Chapter 3 describing the discomfort of female passengers approached by their male counterparts while travelling on the Underground is inevitably informed by my own experience of vulnerability in public spaces. Koole frames this as a question of ‘personal space’ and, while his argument here is convincing, I was also struck by the importance of the gaze – staring or persistent eye contact – in determining the threat posed by male passengers in these interactions. In this sense, the experience of reading Intimate Subjects mirrors its central theme, as each reader will respond to the work in light of their own embodied past.

Koole’s debut monograph is a phenomenal work, meticulous and imaginative in equal measure. The epilogue alone, simply titled ‘Tender’, is a significant contribution to the field: in recognizing the contemporary resonances of the book’s central question – what does it mean to exist in the world as a body both vulnerable to and capable of affecting others? – it demonstrates a degree of social conscience to which all historical scholarship should aspire.