London’s hot and busy summer of 1858

One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli and the Great Stink of 1858. By Rosemary Ashton. Yale University Press; 338 pages; $30 and £25.

IF YOU wanted to devote an entire book to a year in Victorian Britain, 1858 would not be an obvious choice. Rosemary Ashton, who has done just that, admits as much. No famous novel was published, and the government, like many just before it, collapsed in a vote of no confidence. Historians prefer 1859: Charles Darwin published his “On the Origin of Species”, the Liberal Party was founded, and Dickens, Tennyson, Eliot and Mill all produced major works. 1861 brought the death of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria’s withdrawal from public life. So why 1858?

Ms Ashton sees the year’s importance reflected in the lives of three Victorians. Benjamin Disraeli would have to wait until 1868 to become prime minister. But his second run as chancellor, beginning in 1858, proved his worthiness as he steered important bills through Parliament, at times acting in place of the gout-ridden prime minister Lord Derby. Dickens began his popular reading tours, earning fantastic sums. And Darwin, after years of pondering evolution, was panicked into finalising his theory after realising that others were reaching conclusions similar to his.

The book’s real strength is its description of London quivering between modernity and the dark ages. Amid record-breaking heat and the stench of a filthy Thames, engineers proposed an improved sewer system, still believing the (soon to fall from favour) airborne theory of infection. Laws making divorce easier were accompanied by infamous cases in which husbands tried to have their wives declared insane. While the government allowed the first non-Christians to sit in Parliament, pious scientists vehemently opposed Darwinian evolution.

Against this backdrop Ms Ashton narrates scandals of high society, drawing on private correspondence and the penny papers. A well-known doctor was accused of an affair with a married patient, preventing him from verifying her sanity in the divorce court (presided over by the wonderfully named Sir Cresswell Cresswell). A “hot headed and almost paranoid” Dickens, who tormented his wife and resented his “numerous and expensive family”, read rumours of his infidelities in the press. The book focuses a bit too much on these squabbles, when it could give more space to the completion of a transatlantic telegraph cable or the downfall of the East India Company. But there is plenty to enjoy in this panorama of Victorians in their heyday.