Nobody has been left out

Histories of Victorian London now come two a penny. They are the left-wing historian’s answer to biographies of Good Queen Bess. What is there new to say? We start with fog and smells and move on to disease and the working classes. We meet Charles Booth and Henry Mayhew. We chastise the rich and welcome the shift from charity to democracy. Over the Great Wen hovers the great messiah, Improvement. It brings gas, drains, electricity, Peabody homes and rights for women. The millennium arrives with Selfridges and the Underground. Then the Great War spoils everything.

Stephen Inwood is a master of the genre. He has already written an excellent potted history of the capital and now turns his attention to what he calls ‘the birth of modern London’, the three decades after 1880. These were years when London became the greatest metropolis on earth, truly the hub of empire. Just about everything went right.