History in his making

Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City by Tristram Hunt

(Weidenfeld, Pounds 25)

WE take them rather for granted , those palaces of Victorian civic pride and urban civilisation that grace the great cities of Britain: Glasgow University, St Pancras railway terminal, Manchester Town Hall, for example, and the great edifices of Leeds, Liverpool and Birmingham. London, Edinburgh, Bristol and other metropoli had their own monumental architecture before the Victorians, of course, but it was they who built the defining monuments of British civic greatness.

As so often with the Victorians there were contradictions; with standards of living and life-expectancy so low in the cities, why did people still flock to them?

While city corporations were erecting Renaissance splendour among Midlands squalor, why did they not do more to raise the condition of the working classes? Yet rather than getting to grips with these and other important questions, Tristram Hunt has chosen to lay all the blame for what went wrong with Victorian cities on someone who was not born until a quarter of a century after Queen Victoria died.

If one is going to turn a PhD thesis into a political polemic - as former New Labour think-tanker and spin doctor Dr Hunt has unwisely chosen to do - you must be rigorous with your political facts. You cannot write, for example, "There was truly, as Margaret Thatcher once memorably remarked, no such thing as society," if the only memorable thing about the remark is that she never made it.

The spin doctor rather than the objective historian is also evident in the following: "The oil shock of 1973 finally wrenched the country from its post-war imperial complacency. By then the party was well and truly over as unemployment ratcheted upwards and the dawn of monetarism meant Westminster would no longer spend its way out of recession. It was left only to Mrs Thatcher and her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe, to deliver the coup de grace. The politically motivated depression of the early 1980s saw unemployment reach 3.3 million."

The truth, of course, was that the 1973-79 period found Westminster desperately trying to spend its way out of recession, under Edward Heath, Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, and monetarism only dawned when that was shown to have failed.

The conspiracy theory that Thatcher and Howe deliberately plotted to engineer a recession - it wasn't a depression - is quite unworthy of a serious historian (if not of a spin doctor).

In taking Friedrich Engels's and Charles Dickens's word for what life in the Victorian city was really like - Engels is quoted extensively, 10 times in a row in one chapter alone - Dr Hunt is similarly short on objectivity. If we don't believe Mr Micawber, Mr Pickwick and Fagin were intended as accurate representations of real people, why should Fagin's lair be considered an attempt to describe a real place? If, like Engels, you are trying either to foment proletarian revolution, or, like Dickens, you want to sell novels, you're not on oath as social historians.

DR Hunt's sentences, such as: " The wealthy middle classes could swan off without coming into contact with the social consequences of their actions," and "The Marxist revolution never happened and instead the bourgeoisie triumphed - but ironically, in the process laying the seeds of their own cultural extinction," are more chippy than intellectually or historically rigorous, while "The process of industrialisation had split Manchester into two nations of rich and poor," while banal, also implies a kind of maypole-dancing preindustrial Manchester of social harmony and sweetness.

More history and less sub-Marxoid ranting would have made this a far better book.

. Andrew Roberts's What Might Have Been is published by Weidenfeld.

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