"Modernity and meaning in Victorian London: tourist views of the imperial capital" (original) (raw)

, Joseph De Sapio's first book, like the city it examines, is full of potential fascinating destinations. Examining the modalities of mid-to-late nineteenth-century tourism originating in multiple sites and converging on the British capital, Modernity and Meaning attempts to plot the ways in which colonial subjects, fellow Europeans, Americans, and British non-Londoners used London as a space to define themselves, each other, and the rising tide of modernity. De Sapio works to unpack the myriad ways tourists from these different points of origin envisioned and experienced Londonand how political, social, cultural, commercial, and technological ties to London and the British Empire writ large worked to construct tourists' experiences and uses for the city itself before, during, and after their visit. At the imperial crossroads, the author argues, these travelers actively searched for and ascribed multiple and often conflicting meanings to the city, its inhabitants, its layout, its environment, its social and political construct, and its very history. For those who could afford it, London was a space for self, societal, and imperial reflection and criticism. As suchas can be the case with histories of tourism, especially predating the 'mass' tourism of the mid to late twentieth century -De Sapio's subjects are for the large part wealthy and white. Fully aware that this will not be a 'history from below', the author attempts to justify his focus by pointing out the power and influence wielded by those who took the voyage: capitalists, politicians, journalists, and the social elite. Their privilege and positions, De Sapio suggests, meant that they wielded much clout in local and global debates surrounding definitions and visions of progress and modernity. Pulling from a wide and varied range of travel narratives and engaging in a considerable amount of secondary literature for a monograph of its size, the author carefully explores the ways in which the relationship between London and its tourist visitors effected, and was affected by, these questions of the future. While the book clearly does not struggle for source material -De Sapio fills his pages with contemporary travelogs and literature to great effecthis analysis is also deeply constrained by the singular nature of the sources. While the close readings of colonial, American, British, and continental narratives do point to certain general trends (which De Sapio picks up on and explores in each of his four chapters), they also promote a myopic vision of London. The spaces, movements, and activities of these narratives' authors are well compared and critiqued, but only so far as said authors made note of them to begin with. This issue is exacerbated by the structure of the monograph itself. De Sapio clearly means for each chapter to be centered around these authors' geographic point of origin and resultant discourse on modernity, but in following the writers' proclivities it seems as though he cannot help but tie each chapter to a specific theme as wellracial discussions appear in