fascinating analysis of the relationship between mortality in London and the process ofsuburbanisation which was gathering pace towards the end of the century. The ®nal twochapters draw aspects of the demographic experience of England and Wales together,and offer some conclusions. It is commonly believed that what was special about thepopulation history of England was its nuptiality pattern from the sixteenth to theeighteenth centuries, which kept population growth at modest levels. Yet, by comparingthe English experience of the demographic transition with that of other countries.Woodsis able to point to another important factor: `̀ [i]f the societies of England and north-westEurope were unique in demographic terms then their lack of dependence on arti®ciallyhigh levels of childhoodmortality was surely of at least equal signi®cance compared withtheir distinctive marriage pattern. Without this dependence the demographic revolutioncould occur earlier and be initiated without external policy or technical interventions.''(p. 397).

The book is not balanced. In his preface, Woods says that this is ``a demographic studywritten by a geographer'' (p. xxiii). It therefore follows the long tradition of demographicstudies and largely ignores migration, except to the extent that urbanisation is aconsequence of migration. For me, this is not a problem. Nineteenth-century migrationhas, in any event, been recently examined thoroughly in C. Pooley and J. Turnbull'srecent book Migration and Mobility in Britain since the Eighteenth Century. However,I think it is fair to warn readers of this journal that they will ®nd neither an analysis ofmigration patterns and ¯ows nor of its determinants here. The number of pages devotedto the analysis of mortality and its secular decline is about twice the total number devotedto the analysis of nuptiality and fertility. This emphasis partly re¯ects the availability ofdata: the Victorians were much more concerned with mortality trends and differentialsand therefore concentrated their efforts on collecting and analysing data on mortality. Inpart, though, it re¯ects the author's own interests, and the research he has carried outover the past two decades. I think that the fairest way to evaluate this book is as a reportof two decades of empirical research into fertility andmortality in Victorian England andWales. Viewed in this way, it will be essential reading for anyone interested in thepopulation history of nineteenth century England, or in the English demographictransition. So far as mortality decline is concerned, it re-de®nes the current state ofknowledge about the processes of change, marking a substantial empirical advance. Evenwith respect to fertility changes, where current research has rather overtaken Woods'sanalysis, there is much of value to be gained from reading it. Finally, the quality andoriginality of the many ®gures and maps (including a colour section) represent one of thegreatest strengths of the book. I found myself looking for long periods at the ®gures,as they revealed new aspects of the demographic transformation of Victorian Englandand Wales.

Andrew HindeUniversity of Southampton

doi:10.1006/jhge.2002.0437, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-CenturyLondon (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. ix�251. £19.95hardback)

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Babylon is a familiar trope among urban commentatorsÐthe city of spectacle,celebrating human ingenuity, which is also the city of inequality, exploitation andexcess, containing the seeds of its own destruction. (I was in the middle of typing thisreview when the World Trade Center in New York City was destroyed). So Nead begins

310 REVIEWS

with Babylon as ``an uneasy image for London's identity in the modern world'' (p. 3) andends with Gustave Dor�e's image of `̀ The New Zealander'' looking out at a London inruins. But in the intervening pages she is less concerned with direct allusions to Babylonthan with London as an expression of ``the contradictory impulses of modernity'' forwhich ``Ruin is the resolution'' (p. 214). Her interests in modernity are inherentlygeographical, regarding space as `̀ an active constituent of historical consciousness'' (p. 8).Like Miles Ogborn, in his Spaces of Modernity (1998), Nead focuses on some speci®csites, though unlike his interest in eighteenth-century London, she concentrates on amore conventionally `̀ modern'' period, the 1850s and 1860s. But the spaces she exploreseither embraced ruination in their construction, such as the carving of new streets andrailways, including the ®rst underground railway, through an already densely developedcity, or themselves ended in ruin: Cremorne Pleasure Gardens in Chelsea, the haunt ofbohemian society in themid-nineteenth-century city, were dismembered and the artefactsof pleasure auctioned off in the late 1870s; Holywell Street, marginal both socially (as asite for Jewish traders and pornographic booksellers) and spatially (on the boundarybetween City and West End), made way for the building of the Aldwych, London's®n de sieÁcle version of Haussmannization. Destruction is especially present in Nead'sfocus on the picturesque. ``The conventions of the picturesque were reinvented torepresent the contingencies of the modern metropolis'' (p. 6), in illustrations thatjuxtaposed old and new, destruction and constructionÐof®ce buildings replacingtumbledown houses in the City, the cut-and-cover incision of the underground railwaypast pre-Victorian buildings teetering on the brink of collapse into the underworldÐorsituations where modern sensibilitiesÐthe invention of the pastÐattracted picturesquerenderings of slums and other disruptions to the circulatory economy. Holywell Streetand Temple Bar, both discussed in Part III, were physical constrictions on moderncirculation; the former was also pivotal in the wrong kind of circulationÐof seditiousand obscene literature and illustrations, yet, almost incestuously, it was itself the subjectof a copious literature and numerous paintings, prints and photographs purporting todepict picturesque London. So, Nead avers, obscenity was both ``improvement's other''and the `̀ progeny of the modern city'' (p. 8).

Handsomely produced, lavishly illustrated, including a generous use of colour, yetmodestly priced, presumably intended for a more-than-academic market, VictorianBabylon nevertheless deploys theory deftly, with a commendably light touch. The shadesof Benjamin, Foucault and de Certeau are periodically invoked, especially the latter,whose panoptic versus ground-level perspectives are apposite for an unplanned city oftenregarded as a labyrinth, where knowledge was to be gained from the balloon ascent.Nead develops these ideas further by reference to Louis Marin's differentiation betweenpanoramic and geometric forms of mapping, the balloon view contrasted with theOrdnance Survey's 1851 Skeleton Map of a London stripped bare. Nead utilises animpressive range of visual and literary sources, including ®ne art, sheet music covers,playbills, cartoons, court proceedings and private correspondence. Evidence is often read`̀ against the grain'', especially in discussing the presence of women on the streets ofmid-Victorian London, challenging the cruder versions of a `̀ separate spheres''argument. Amelia Roper was an unexceptional suburban woman, but her letters to aclose friend reveal her ``experimenting with risky, metropolitan feminine identities'' in hervisits to town. By a neat coincidence her visit to the generally respectable OlympicTheatre, which closes Part I of the book (on `̀ Mapping and Movement''), brought herwithin yards of Holywell Street, the focus of Part III (on `̀ Streets and Obscenity''). Inbetween, Part II on ``Gas and Light'' concentrates on Cremorne Gardens, Victoriansuccessor to the eighteenth-century Vauxhall Gardens discussed by Ogborn, transformednightly from a site of innocent family fun by daylight to one of louche sensuality bygaslight. Cremorne was `̀ modern'' in its dependence on advertising, its courting ofpublicity, its tie-ins with other consumer products (such as sheet music), and especially itsdependence on arti®cial light. So the ®rst section of Part II focuses on the production of

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light in London's gas industry. It is usually argued that arti®cial light produced a`̀ colonization of the night'', expunging natural rhythms, but also accentuating thedifference between lit and unlit areas. Nead shows that gas was a much more nuancedcommodity, disrupting a narrative of modernity focused on shorter working hours andan orderly distinction between times and places of work and non-work. Gas was a vulgar,ostentatious form of light, and it produced an irregular, uncertain illumina-tionÐhallucinatory, mysterious, uncanny. Hence its appropriateness for theatricaldisplays and for the deceptive, ¯irtatious activities associated with Cremorne. Moremundanely, gas was dangerous. It was feared that central London gasworks wouldprovide the catalyst for the material destruction of modern Babylon.

There are elements in this book which I found less convincing. I am not persuaded byHoughton's paintings of street life whose clumsiness Nead celebrates as ``strange andslightly disturbing'', withholding `̀ the comfort of easy legibility'' (p. 47); and theimplication that the Indian Mutiny gave heightened purpose to obscene publicationslegislation simultaneously going through parliament, that Delhi and Holywell Streetwere complementary `̀ manifestations of the other for imperial Britain'' (p. 194) seems tome an interpretation too far. On the other hand, there is a fascinating discussion of thetrope of blindness in illustrations of street life; and a superb section, ``The Rape of theGlances'', based on etiquette guides, newspaper correspondence and illustrations ofwomen and men on the streets of the city; while the chapters on Cremorne explore acornucopia of metropolitan modernity. A speciality of Cremorne entertainment was`̀ Madame Poitevin, seated on a bull and, in the mythological guise of Europa, suspendedfrom the basket of an ascending balloon'' (p. 115). Victorian Babylon is an altogethermore edifying and revealing tour de force. My students liked it too.

Richard DennisUniversity College London

doi:10.1006/jhge.2002.0438, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Provoked theSpanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press,2000. Pp. 320. $16.00 paperback)

This book joins a small but distinguished bookshelf in US history that takes masculinityseriously. Like Gail Bederman's Manliness and Civilization (Chicago 1994) and E.Anthony Rotundo's American Manhood (New York 1994), Hoganson's book invites usto consider ideologies of maleness as contested, mutable, and importantÐin short, asworthy and indeed necessary, subjects of historical inquiry. She argues that idioms ofmanhood constituted the language in which all phases of the late nineteenth century USwars were debated, from sympathy for the Cuban insurgents to the jingo press to thepressures on President McKinley. UltimatelyÐand this is one of the book's smartestmovesÐideologies of masculinity could do battle for either side, and composed both theargument for participation in the more than a decade-long war to put down thenationalists in the Philippines, as well as the argument against it. A combination offactors led the 1890s to be a particularly contentious time in American cultural andpolitical history, including movements for woman suffrage, depression and class battlesover free silver, skirmishes over race (both in Indian Wars and Jim Crow), and medicaland scienti®c accounts of degeneration. Hoganson argues that rhetorics of genderunderlay them all.

The late nineteenth century US overseas wars and conquest incite endless historio-graphic con¯ict; as Hoganson says, the sheer number of explanations for them ``seem to