James Vernon. Distant Strangers

Two cheers for Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern. One for its praiseworthy intent to tackle “a big historical question” (p. xv) and to offer a broad and integrated interpretation, rather than to seek refuge in deconstruction and complication. Another for its boldness in taking on the challenge of doing this in 60,000 words rather than the 260,000 or 620,000 words increasingly normal in our digitally bloated world. But not yet the full huzzah because, even making the necessary allowances for limitations that extent imposes on ambition, this is not an entirely satisfactory extended essay. Distant Strangers offers an exploration of “the greatest historical transformation of the past three centuries,” an interrogation of “how we became modern,” and an examination of “the character of modern life that is sometimes described as ‘modernity’” (p. xi). This is a challenging task, not least because “modernity” is almost impossible to constitute in any set of meanings sufficiently stable to act as an organizing distinction of the sort the book requires. James Vernon's answer to the “what is modernity?” question tends to deflect toward historiographical description. Ultimately, we are offered the shorthand designation, the “new society of strangers” (p. 7), in lieu of a definition, and presented with the consideration of a set of large-scale transformations in which the process (of “becoming modern”) is asked to stand in for the condition (of “being modern”).

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