Thames: The Biography [Paperback]

Peter Ackroyd (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 3, 2009

In this perfect companion to London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd once again delves into the hidden byways of history, describing the river's endless allure in a journey overflowing with characters, incidents, and wry observations. Thames: The Biography meanders gloriously, rather like the river itself. In short, lively chapters Ackroyd writes about connections between the Thames and such historical figures as Julius Caesar and Henry VIII, and offers memorable portraits of the ordinary men and women who depend upon the river for their livelihoods. The Thames as a source of artistic inspiration comes brilliantly to life as Ackroyd invokes Chaucer, Shakespeare, Turner, Shelley, and other writers, poets, and painters who have been enchanted by its many moods and colors.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. For a river with such a famous history, England's Thames measures only 215 miles. Acclaimed novelist and biographer Ackroyd (Hawksmoor; Shakespeare) invites readers on an eclectic, sprawling and delightful cruise of this important waterway. The Thames has been a highway, a frontier and an attack route; it has been a playground and a sewer, a source of water and a source of power, writes Ackroyd. Historians believe the river may have been important for transport and commerce as early as the Neolithic Age. The ancient Egyptian goddess Isis has a long association with the Thames, which was used for baptisms, both pagan and Christian, during the Roman Empire. The British tribes tried to use the Thames as a defense against Julius Caesar's invasion, and the Normans built the Tower of London and Windsor Castle on the Thames as symbols of military preeminence. The royal waterway carried Anne Boleyn to both her coronation and her beheading, and famously served as inspiration for paintings by Turner and Monet and for Handel's Water Music, commissioned to associate the German-born George I with a potent source of English power. Elegant and erudite, Ackroyd's gathering of rich treats does the famed tributary proud. Illus., maps. (Nov. 4)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker

This lavishly produced volume is Ackroyd�s omnivorous paean to �the shortest river in the world to acquire such a famous history.� Eschewing standard organization, Ackroyd jumps from today�s posh London banks to Roger Bacon�s observatory at Grandpont to Dickens�s �deathlike and mysterious� waterway. We learn about the riverbank�s many species of willow (white, weeping, crack, cane osier), and about the Retribution and the Belliqueux, eighteenth-century prison boats that each held hundreds of men. A chapter on types of sludge through history makes one grateful for today�s raw sewage, as opposed to the �Intrails of bestes� that washed up in the fifteenth century. A survey of the many ways in which the river can kill notes that most Thames suicides remain �anonymous and unlamented.� Not every tidbit will appeal to every reader, but the book demands to be read as it was written, according to one�s fancy.
Copyright ©2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (November 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307389847
• ISBN-13: 978-0307389848
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.2 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #495,271 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A joy to read; the ultimate tribute to a city and a river, November 20, 2008

By 

S. McGee (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Thames: The Biography (Hardcover)

When I opened Ackroyd's biography of Sir Thomas More many years ago, and read the pages in which he imagines how his subject wended his way to school through late 15th century London and what he saw and encountered on his way, I was stunned by his uncanny ability to create, de facto, two characters: More and London itself. Happily for us all, he has gone on to write a series of three books that really do serve as "biographies of place", if such a phrase exists. The first was London: The Biography, the second, Albion: Origins of the English Imagination, a tour de force of what is distinctively English. The third in the series is this biography of the Thames River. However unlikely the subject, the book is easily the equal of anything else this eclectic and accomplished author has produced.
As anyone who has ever flown into Heathrow airport across the span of London has seen first hand, the river twists like a silver ribbon throughout the city of London, and leads onward to the sea and up into the heart of the country. Ackroyd's narrative is as sparkling as water should be and thankfully not as sludgy as that of the Thames in London itself too often still is, and takes nearly as many twists and turns in describing its subjects.
Ackroyd, for instance, delves into the symbolic meaning and physical construction of bridges across the Thames, from the earliest days, to the medieval London Bridge and on to the present. The Magna Carta -- the base document on which Anglo-American democracy was founded -- was signed in a meadow by the Thames some 800 years ago. Centuries later, the London docks helped establish London as the center of a commercial empire and were the departure point for generations of explorers, from Raleigh and Drake onwards. (Some of those vessels are still moored for visitors to explore along the banks.) From riverside pubs (although my personal London favorite, the Prospect of Whitby, doesn't rate a mention) to gardens, the river was a place of recreation. But it was also a place of death; just as Anne Boleyn rode along it in barges alongside Henry VIII, she later traveled to her execution in the Tower of London on the Thames, a route followed by her daughter, Elizabeth I, two decades later (to a happier outcome.) Traitors' heads were routinely displayed on London Bridge for all to see; the tale is that Margaret Roper, Thomas More's daughter, removed her father's head from a spike there after his beheading.
It's to be hoped that the City of London and all the other towns and cities that lie along the length of the Thames are suitably grateful to Peter Ackroyd for this elegant and beautifully written book. It's impossible to imagine that it won't create a sudden spike in tourism to the Thames Valley among as many readers as it reaches. I'm already planning my spring visit to a friend there. His home? Well, it's a modern condo built within an old Bermondsey wharf building and from the balcony overhanging the river, I can hear the sound of the water and watch all the watercraft travel between Westminster and Greenwich. And yes, I'll be packing this book to re-read while I sit there...

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A box of delights, March 31, 2009

By 

Anonymous (London) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Thames: The Biography (Hardcover)

Chapeau! Kudos! Peter Ackroyd has done a terrific job with this book. From his early novel _Hawksmoor_, Ackroyd has evolved into the chronicler par excellence of London, both through his book of the same name and by the flavour of London life in his biographies of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Sir Thomas More, Dickens, Blake, and other works (both fictional and non).

This cornucopia has history, geography, geology, spirituality, sociology, literary and cultural referencing, psychology, life cycles, transport, trade, ecology, hedonism, commercialism. It's a staggeringly accomplished chronicle and a worthy tribute to the liquid heart of London.

Ackroyd ranges masterfully from facts and statistics - some of them fascinating - through to dreams and legends. Although London dominates, this deals with the villages and towns along the Thames - e.g., Windsor as represented by the poet Alexander Pope. The historical thread moves from the prehistoric river, and the Thames Caesar conquered, through to the modern flood protection afforded by the Thames Barrier. Notwithstanding its erudition, the flow is ceaseless and the touch light, so that it's an easy, satisfying read.

Thankfully, Ackroyd controls his trademark fascination in filth and murk aspects, balancing them judiciously with the elevated, refined and spiritual. He delightedly describes the Fleet as "merd-urinous", "wholly rank" and "the excremental centre of London's polluted life". This is tempered by the view "at twilight, a soft grey, a lacustrine light."

With its buried coins and weapons, syringes, severed heads, the river is a "depository of past lives" but Ackroyd gives us a final vision of "estuarial river" rushing to the "sea's embrace."

I can do no better than let the chapters speak for themselves:

1. "The Mirror of history": river as fact (statistics) and metaphor - the "museum of Englishness", symbolizing the national character. Time of the river: Hydrologic and geologic.
2. Father Thames - river deities, Thames Basin, birth/source aspects
3. Issuing Forth: tributaries, especially the Fleet.
4. Beginnings: Ice Ages, barrows, and henges; Caesar and Vikings.
5. The sacred river - saints and ruins: includes Norman palaces, Westminster Abbey, monasteries(work and education), plague and fire.
6.Elemental and Equal: riverine cycle/essence and social upheavals/revolutions.
7. The working river -: River boats, London Bridge and subways, river law and conservation; the criminal element (theft, witches); watermen, porters, weir keepers.
8. River of trade - wharves, mills, breweries, docks, modern decline - new financial districts e.g. Canary Wharf and Docklands.
9. The Natural River: fog, wind, rain, the Thames Barrier (flood protection). Sacred woods and trees, villages, swans and whales (!)
10. A stream of pleasure - pubs, sports, carnivals, Lord Mayor's pageant, physic gardens Contrasts with mortality, sewers, and typhus in the 18th-19th centuries.
11. The healing spring - wells, hospitals, flowers. A rhapsodic chapter....
12. The river of art - Turner, Conrad, Jerome - chroniclers (the 16th-century antiquarian John Leland), novelists (Dickens, Grahame), poets Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Pope, Shelley, Arnold.
13. Shadows and depth - Visions of Carroll and Traherne. Local history; dreams and legends.
14. The river of death - riverine findings (coins, weapons, syringes, severed heads). Mythology. Suicides, murders, drownings.
15. The river's end - the estuarial river which "rushes to the sea's embrace."

A grand achievement. Prepare to be delighted, amazed - and moved.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Thames: The Biography; Not so Great, January 17, 2009

By 

The Prisoner "S. of NYC" (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Thames: The Biography (Hardcover)

This 'biography' of the river was interesting for about the first 150 pages. However, Ackroyd's wordy descriptions and repetition of facts already presented became quite tiresome. At the halfway point I was already begging for it to be done, yet it continued dragging along. Finishing the book was a chore, rather than a pleasure, and was not worth the few interesting tidbits I now know, nor was it balanced out by the parts of the book which were actually enjoyable.