Walter Bagehot said of Dickens, “He describes London like a special correspondent for posterity.” Liza Picard, a former Inland Revenue lawyer in England, has spent her retirement as a sleuth of London’s social history in Elizabethan London, Restoration London, and Dr. Johnson’s London. Picard is not quite in Dickens’s class, but she dives into Victorian London with true Dickensian élan: her first chapter is entitled “Smells.”
London’s sewer and drainage systems were literally medieval. Some of the heroes in Picard’s book are the indefatigably meticulous sanitary reformers: Edwin Chadwick, whose 1842 parliamentary report, The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population, Harriet Martineau found as gripping as a novel; Dr. John Snow, who confirmed the water-borne spread of cholera from his observations at the Broad Street pump; and the engineer Joseph Bazalgette, who planned and built the sewers that London still uses today.
On domestic details—such as arsenical wallpaper, laundry, and the weight of women’s clothes—Picard has been trumped by Judith Flanders’s brilliant researches in Inside the Victorian Home. Outside the home, however, Picard skilfully traverses Victorian institutions like the railways, workhouses, post offices, garden cemeteries, and prisons. She covers old schools (Charterhouse, Westminster), new schools (Working Men’s Colleges, Ragged Schools, the Polytechnic, Queen’s College for Girls), and schools almost no one has written about (the Jewish Free School and the Freemasons’ schools). She has (not surprisingly) an illuminating paragraph on the income tax.
Picard’s book has no designs on us, but the outpouring of detailed information makes up an odd kind of balance sheet to test ourselves against: how grateful I am not to be a mud lark; how chagrined at my lack of industry; how pleased to have plumbing.
A note on endnotes: Picard’s narrative notes are a delight. Her notes referring to sources, however, give no page numbers—thus, they’re merely clutter for anyone reading for pleasure and useless for people who’d like to track down a toothsome tidbit. A further caveat: The index is better than nothing, but many fun items in the text do not appear in it.