London in the Nineteenth Century, by Jerry White

Streets are infested with beggars and prostitutes. Legions of the poor occupy overcrowded, insanitary dwellings, while those at the other end of the social scale cavort at glitzy parties. Friction between immigrants and longer-standing residents is increasing, while fears of terrorism add to an undercurrent of political unrest.

Inadequate and often corrupt policing is blamed for the perception that crime is out of control, and the jails are full to bursting. Utopian town planning is thwarted by economic constraints. Traffic is in chronic gridlock and the trains are desperately overcrowded. The media are attacked for being "cynical, hypocritical and venal". Moreover, journalists are enthusiastic participants in another scourge of the age: binge drinking.

That litany of urban woes is not an extract from a querulous editorial in a present-day newspaper but a summary of Jerry White's sprawling, vivid portrait of 19th-century London. While it would be ludicrous to argue from this that not much has changed in the capital over the past 150 years, the book's lesson is that the underlying ills and tensions of a great city remain stubbornly constant, defying an abundance of well-meaning strategies aimed at eradicating them. Time may palliate the symptoms but the fundamental sickness remains.

White - who won the Wolfson History Award in 2001 for his account of 20th-century London - has not structured the book chronologically but divided it into 15 specific topics grouped under five broad themes. This fragmentary approach is reader-friendly, but the downside is that it rules out making any powerful over-arching argument. In particular, it blurs the role of the principal factor that defined the century: the coming of universal education.

There is no chapter solely devoted to the topic. White deals with the early church schools summarily under "Religion and charity". We have to wait until the last few pages before he gets round to the 1870 Elementary Education Act, although when he does he observes that "of all the great civilising influences on the Londoner in the nineteenth century compulsory schooling was the most momentous".

Until then, he had addressed the topic only in passing, in the elegant cameos of the capital's social history that form the bulk of the book. The mob culture and violence that scarred the early years of the century were, he writes, later moderated through "religious influences and education". More positively, increasing literacy fuelled the rise of a burgeoning newspaper and publishing industry.

Again, in a salacious chapter on "Private Pleasures", White notes that the allure of the capital's prostitutes had increased by the 1890s as a result of "school board education and an acquired knowledge of the laws of hygiene". Charles Booth wrote that in humanising the "poor and degraded people", the influence of the schools had grown greater than that of the churches.

London's low point came around 1830, when the population was exploding, violence an everyday occurrence, disease rife and sanitation minimal. Cats were skinned alive for their fur in the streets.

From there, things could only get better. New roads were driven through the most notorious slums. Suburban trains allowed workers to move away from the festering city centre, although new areas of squalor and vice were soon created. Public health was improved by Bazalgette's magnificent sewer system and the provision of municipal bath houses. Public libraries hastened the drive towards universal literacy.

Thus at the end of the century, with the population of Greater London more than six and a half million, "when people looked back over their own lives, or at the fictions and histories from 50, even 30 years before, they wondered how they and their city could have come so far, or could ever have had so far to go". Utopia, though, was still tantalisingly out of reach - and remains so 100 years later.

Michael Leapman's 'Great Britain' is published this week by Dorling Kindersley