Liza Picard: Victorian London: The Tale of a City 1840-1870.(Shorter notices)(Book review)

Liza Picard Victorian London: The Tale of a City 1840-1870. St. Martin's Press, 368 pages, $29.95

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 elan: 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 ...