Robert Musil said there was nothing more invisible than a monument -- which might explain why, on the centennial of Queen Victoria's death, one notices so few Victorian traces in London: We don't see them because they're too familiar. Not just monuments, but houses, streets, warehouses, the underground, the sewers, and other nineteenth-century remnants. London, in this sense, retains many eminently invisible features of its Victorian past.

Pubs -- as quintessentially Victorian as Christmas -- are often renovated and redesigned as hipster bars. Just as often, however, a Victorian-style pub closes for renovation and re-opens as -- a renovated Victorian pub! (Looking like nothing else so much as a vast Victorian boozer, the recently completed extension of the Houses of Parliament seems an attempt to elevate this tendency to the level of constitutional reform.) This kind of cleanup never really works though; it always imparts a hint of the museum, theme park, or film set to a place. One of the reasons for this is the most distinctive feature of the Victorian city: the thick layer of black, industrial grime that encased buildings like a second skin. By the late nineteenth century, even Oxford colleges had acquired the sooty look of knowledge factories. Over the past ten years, this sediment of geological pollution has been painstakingly blasted away from more and more buildings. The stonework that emerges bright and glowing from its protective covering of soot has effectively been de-Victorianized. So much so that although it is set largely in Oxford, the film adaptation of Hardy's Jude the Obscure had to be shot in Edinburgh because Oxford had become too clean, too new. It had, in effect, become pre-Victorian.

In similar style, Jack the Ripper tours of the East End of London (in which visitors are shown round the sites of 'orrible murders) or the recent TV series in which volunteers spent several months living in a Victorian house complete with an authentically nineteenth-century lack of amenities emphasize not the living proximity of the past but its remoteness. This distance is dramatically evident at two of London's railway stations, which have been overhauled and redesigned so comprehensively that few traces of their nineteenth-century origins remain. The change is felt especially powerfully because Paddington and Waterloo -- until recently symbols of the weighty legacy of the Victorian era -- now aspire to the condition of airports, of international arrival and departure lounges. (Passengers for the Heathrow Express are invited to check in at Paddington.)

Less specifically, the Victorian era enjoyed a kind of negative adjacency to the late sixties and early seventies that no longer pertains. The emergence of what used to be called the permissive society depended on the monolithic idea of Victorian rigidity and repression as a prison from which the manifold impulses of sexual liberation would break out. This was embedded, most vividly, in the conception of John Fowles's 1969 novel The French Lieutenant's Woman, which intimately entwined the two periods. Perhaps that is why the book now seems doubly dated.

Mention of Fowles's meta-Victorian novel also alerts us to the possibility that the term "Victorian" actually has less to do with Victoria than with Dickens. V. S. Naipaul reckons that "no city or landscape is truly real unless it has been given the quality of myth" by a writer or painter. By Victorian, then, we often mean Dickensian. The reign of a queen lasts as long as it lasts; what endures is a perceived structure of feeling that results from the cultural production that coincided with that reign. London may still in places look like a Victorian city, may even feel on occasions like a Dickensian city, but it is not until you go to Bombay that you realize how few and far between those moments are. London's Victorian elements (the buildings, the underground, the sewers) are residual; in Bombay they are alive and bustling. With its teeming crowds, appalling human destitution, relentless noise, lung-corrupting smog, besmirched and hulking architecture (the Victorian Terminus, most obviously, modeled on St. Pancras station in London, built in 1887, now known as Chatrapathi Shivaji Terminus), downtown Bombay feels a more enduringly Victorian -- that is to say, more Dickensian -- creation than London ever does.