Gillian Tindall
A River Runs Through It
Victorian London: The Life of a City 1840–1870
By Liza Picard
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 353pp £20 order from our bookshop
The Thames: England’s River
By Jonathan Schneer
Little, Brown 330pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
We are living in a golden age of social history, with professional historians, novelists and amateur genealogists all eagerly excavating the past. Since the seventeenth century there have been select groups of antiquarians, but most people in all the eras before our own were genuinely too much occupied – with war and other tumults, with privation and personal hazards, with the stagnant grind of poverty or with the exhilaration of hard-won gains – to empathise much with their ancestors or to explore the buried layers of their own familiar habitats. Only now, in the period of relative peace and gluttonous prosperity that has been ours since the late 1950s, have large numbers of us tried to summon from oblivion all the neglected generations lying behind us with an almost yearning concern to know ‘How was it for you?’.
Books that have to do with London’s past have multiplied in the last two decades and standards are high, whether for fact-crammed compendiums or visionary personal evocations. To some extent Victorian London and The Thames represent these different categories, except that Liza Picard’s book, though wonderfully entertaining and on the
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'This problem has dogged Labour’s efforts to become the "natural party of government", a sobriquet which the Conservatives have acquired over decades, despite their far less compelling record of achievement.'
Charles Clarke on Labour's civil wars.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/comrade-versus-comrade
'Lamb has always attracted admirers ... Yet, as Eric G Wilson observes, "Dream-Child" is the first full-scale biography in over a century.'
Edward Weech on the life and work of Charles Lamb.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-man-with-the-golden-pun
My latest children's round up for @Lit_Review feat. @LissaKEvans WISHED, @MissDePlume SMALL!, @skyemc_kenna's HEDGWITCH, @emmac2603 ESCAPE... @PhilipPullman's IMAGINATION...
https://literaryreview.co.uk/there-be-giants