Sex and the city: Metropolitan modernities in English history. (Book Forum).(Spaces of Modernity: London's Geographies 1680-1780)

Despite the enduring popular identification of Victorianism with sexual prudery, a cloying domesticity, and adherence to rigid social conventions, late-nineteenth-century British culture now boasts an impressive (and increasing) association in scholarly literature with the erotic, the spectacular, and the modem. In literary and historical studies alike, the past decade has seen the publication of an array of works in which the Victorian era figures not as a bulwark of conservative repression but rather as an age of social, sexual, and spatial emancipation. New understandings of gender and urban consumer culture have played a key part in this shift in representation, and the department store has in this context gained an almost totemic status as the quintessential symbol of Victorian modernity. Thus for Mica Nava, "shopping and the emergence of the department store" represent "key iconic aspects of modem urban society," and late-Victorian women's participation in "the exploding culture of consumption and spect acle" is the arena in which "the everyday lives of large numbers of ordinary women were most deeply affected by the process of modernity" (38, 46). In this prevailing view, department stores and shopping were instrumental to Victorian women's liberation from the domestic circle and their entry into the public sphere. Judith Walkowitz argues that "[m]iddle-class women first established their urban beachheads around West End shopping," which "emerged as a newly elaborated female activity in the 1870s" (46-47); in a similar vein, Erika Rappaport details how later Victorian entrepreneurs and journalists represented the department store as "the agent of female emancipation and pleasure and the symbol of the modem metropolis" (144). Lynn Walker's analysis of department stores as "the most significant symbol of the many pleasures of the modem city open to women" captures the essential features of this ostensibly new metropolitan modernity, finding in the department store "a setting [...] which for the first time gav e women [...] a feeling of being at home in the public sphere, which only men had previously experienced" (79).

Viewed against this late-Victorian backdrop, Miles Ogborn's Spaces of Modernity: London's Geographies 1680-1780 (1998) offers an especially refreshing perspective on the making of modern urban cultures in England. Ogborn's book is a broadly interdisciplinary study of the city's historical geography which draws its insights from maps and tracts, travel diaries and philosophical treatises, prints, plays, and political arithmetic. Five case studies frame this analysis of the spatial construction of modernity in late-seventeenth-and eighteenth-century London. Ogborn begins with the Magdalen Hospital, an institution established in Whitechapel in 1758 …