Living in Early Victorian London

Living in Early Victorian London PDF Author: Michael Alpert
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1399060864
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
London in the 1840s was sprawling and smoke-filled, a city of extreme wealth and abject poverty. Some streets were elegant with brilliantly gas-lit shop windows full of expensive items, while others were narrow, fetid, muddy, and in many cases foul with refuse and human filth. Railways, stations and sidings were devouring whole districts and creating acres of slums or ‘rookeries’ into which the poor of the city were jammed and where crime, disease and prostitution were rife. The most sensational crime of the epoch, the murder of Patrick O’Connor by Frederick and Maria Manning, filled the press in the summer and autumn of 1849. Michael Alpert uses the trial record of this murder, accompanied by numerous other contemporary sources, among them journalism, diaries and fiction, to show how day-to-day lives, birth, death, sickness, work, shopping, cooking, and buying clothes, were lived in the crowded, noisy capital in the early decades of Victoria’s reign. These sources illustrate how ordinary people lived in London, their incomes, entertainments, religious practice, reading and education, their hopes and anxieties. Life in Early Victorian London reveals how ordinary people like the Mannings and thousands of others experienced their multifaceted lives in the greatest capital city of the world. Early Victorian London lived on the cusp of great improvements, but it was a city which in some aspects was mediaeval. Its inhabitants enjoyed the benefit of the Penny Post and the omnibus, and they were protected to some extent by a police force. The Mannings fled their crime on the railway, were trapped by the recently-invented telegraph and arrested by ‘detectives’ (a new concept and word), but they were hanged in public as murderers had been for centuries, watched by a baying, drunken and swearing mob.

Living in Early Victorian London

Living in Early Victorian London PDF Author: Michael Alpert
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1399060864
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

Get Book Here

Book Description
London in the 1840s was sprawling and smoke-filled, a city of extreme wealth and abject poverty. Some streets were elegant with brilliantly gas-lit shop windows full of expensive items, while others were narrow, fetid, muddy, and in many cases foul with refuse and human filth. Railways, stations and sidings were devouring whole districts and creating acres of slums or ‘rookeries’ into which the poor of the city were jammed and where crime, disease and prostitution were rife. The most sensational crime of the epoch, the murder of Patrick O’Connor by Frederick and Maria Manning, filled the press in the summer and autumn of 1849. Michael Alpert uses the trial record of this murder, accompanied by numerous other contemporary sources, among them journalism, diaries and fiction, to show how day-to-day lives, birth, death, sickness, work, shopping, cooking, and buying clothes, were lived in the crowded, noisy capital in the early decades of Victoria’s reign. These sources illustrate how ordinary people lived in London, their incomes, entertainments, religious practice, reading and education, their hopes and anxieties. Life in Early Victorian London reveals how ordinary people like the Mannings and thousands of others experienced their multifaceted lives in the greatest capital city of the world. Early Victorian London lived on the cusp of great improvements, but it was a city which in some aspects was mediaeval. Its inhabitants enjoyed the benefit of the Penny Post and the omnibus, and they were protected to some extent by a police force. The Mannings fled their crime on the railway, were trapped by the recently-invented telegraph and arrested by ‘detectives’ (a new concept and word), but they were hanged in public as murderers had been for centuries, watched by a baying, drunken and swearing mob.

Dirty Old London

Dirty Old London PDF Author: Lee Jackson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300192053
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
In Victorian London, filth was everywhere: horse traffic filled the streets with dung, household rubbish went uncollected, cesspools brimmed with "night soil," graveyards teemed with rotting corpses, the air itself was choked with smoke. In this intimately visceral book, Lee Jackson guides us through the underbelly of the Victorian metropolis, introducing us to the men and women who struggled to stem a rising tide of pollution and dirt, and the forces that opposed them. Through thematic chapters, Jackson describes how Victorian reformers met with both triumph and disaster. Full of individual stories and overlooked details--from the dustmen who grew rich from recycling, to the peculiar history of the public toilet--this riveting book gives us a fresh insight into the minutiae of daily life and the wider challenges posed by the unprecedented growth of the Victorian capital.

Victorian London

Victorian London PDF Author: Liza Picard
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 1780226527
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 549

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Book Description
From rag-gatherers to royalty, from fish knives to Freemasons: everyday life in Victorian London. Like its acclaimed companion volumes, Elizabeth's London, Restoration London and Dr Johnson's London, this book is the product of the author's passionate interest in the realities of everyday life so often left out of history books. This period of mid Victorian London covers a huge span: Victoria's wedding and the place of the royals in popular esteem; how the very poor lived, the underworld, prostitution, crime, prisons and transportation; the public utilities - Bazalgette on sewers and road design, Chadwick on pollution and sanitation; private charities - Peabody, Burdett Coutts - and workhouses; new terraced housing and transport, trains, omnibuses and the Underground; furniture and decor; families and the position of women; the prosperous middle classes and their new shops, such as Peter Jones and Harrods; entertaining and servants, food and drink; unlimited liability and bankruptcy; the rich, the marriage market, taxes and anti-semitism; the Empire, recruitment and press-gangs. The period begins with the closing of the Fleet and Marshalsea prisons and ends with the first (steam-operated) Underground trains and the first Gilbert & Sullivan.

The Victorian City

The Victorian City PDF Author: Judith Flanders
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1466835451
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed author of The Invention of Murder, an extraordinary, revelatory portrait of everyday life on the streets of Dickens' London. The nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented change, and nowhere was this more apparent than London. In only a few decades, the capital grew from a compact Regency town into a sprawling metropolis of 6.5 million inhabitants, the largest city the world had ever seen. Technology—railways, street-lighting, and sewers—transformed both the city and the experience of city-living, as London expanded in every direction. Now Judith Flanders, one of Britain's foremost social historians, explores the world portrayed so vividly in Dickens' novels, showing life on the streets of London in colorful, fascinating detail.From the moment Charles Dickens, the century's best-loved English novelist and London's greatest observer, arrived in the city in 1822, he obsessively walked its streets, recording its pleasures, curiosities and cruelties. Now, with him, Judith Flanders leads us through the markets, transport systems, sewers, rivers, slums, alleys, cemeteries, gin palaces, chop-houses and entertainment emporia of Dickens' London, to reveal the Victorian capital in all its variety, vibrancy, and squalor. From the colorful cries of street-sellers to the uncomfortable reality of travel by omnibus, to the many uses for the body parts of dead horses and the unimaginably grueling working days of hawker children, no detail is too small, or too strange. No one who reads Judith Flanders's meticulously researched, captivatingly written The Victorian City will ever view London in the same light again.

The Great Surge

The Great Surge PDF Author: Steven Radelet
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476764794
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
The untold story of the global poor: “Powerful, lucid, and revelatory, The Great Surge…offers indispensable prescriptions about sustaining global economic progress into the future” (George Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management). We live today at a time of great progress for the global poor. Never before have so many people, in so many developing countries, made so much progress, in so short a time in reducing poverty, increasing incomes, improving health, reducing conflict and war, and spreading democracy. Most people believe the opposite: that with a few exceptions like China and India, the majority of developing countries are hopelessly mired in deep poverty, led by inept dictators, and have little hope for change. But a major transformation is underway—and has been for two decades now. Since the early 1990s more than 700 million people have been lifted out of extreme poverty, six million fewer children die every year from disease, tens of millions more girls are in school, millions more people have access to clean water, and democracy—often fragile and imperfect—has become the norm in developing countries around the world. “A terrific book” (Nick Kristof, The New York Times), The Great Surge chronicles this unprecedented economic, social, and political transformation. It shows how the end of the Cold War, the development of new technologies, globalization, and courageous local leadership have combined to improve the fate of hundreds of millions of people in poor countries around the world. Most importantly, The Great Surge reveals how we can accelerate the progress.

A Visitor's Guide to Victorian England

A Visitor's Guide to Victorian England PDF Author: Michelle Higgs
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1473834465
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
An “utterly brilliant” and deeply researched guide to the sights, smells, endless wonders, and profound changes of nineteenth century British history (Books Monthly, UK). Step into the past and experience the world of Victorian England, from clothing to cuisine, toilet arrangements to transport—and everything in between. A Visitor’s Guide to Victorian England is “a brilliant guided tour of Charles Dickens’s and other eminent Victorian Englishmen’s England, with insights into where and where not to go, what type of people you’re likely to meet, and what sights and sounds to watch out for . . . Utterly brilliant!” (Books Monthly, UK). Like going back in time, Higgs’s book shows armchair travelers how to find the best seat on an omnibus, fasten a corset, deal with unwanted insects and vermin, get in and out of a vehicle while wearing a crinoline, and avoid catching an infectious disease. Drawing on a wide range of sources, this book blends accurate historical details with compelling stories to bring alive the fascinating details of Victorian daily life. It is a must-read for seasoned social history fans, costume drama lovers, history students, and anyone with an interest in the nineteenth century.

Curiosities of London Life: or, Phases, physiological and social, of the great Metropolis

Curiosities of London Life: or, Phases, physiological and social, of the great Metropolis PDF Author: Charl. Manby Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description


Verdi in Victorian London

Verdi in Victorian London PDF Author: Massimo Zicari
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 178374216X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Now a byword for beauty, Verdi’s operas were far from universally acclaimed when they reached London in the second half of the nineteenth century. Why did some critics react so harshly? Who were they and what biases and prejudices animated them? When did their antagonistic attitude change? And why did opera managers continue to produce Verdi’s operas, in spite of their alleged worthlessness? Massimo Zicari’s Verdi in Victorian London reconstructs the reception of Verdi’s operas in London from 1844, when a first critical account was published in the pages of The Athenaeum, to 1901, when Verdi’s death received extensive tribute in The Musical Times. In the 1840s, certain London journalists were positively hostile towards the most talked-about representative of Italian opera, only to change their tune in the years to come. The supercilious critic of The Athenaeum, Henry Fothergill Chorley, declared that Verdi’s melodies were worn, hackneyed and meaningless, his harmonies and progressions crude, his orchestration noisy. The scribes of The Times, The Musical World, The Illustrated London News, and The Musical Times all contributed to the critical hubbub. Yet by the 1850s, Victorian critics, however grudging, could neither deny nor ignore the popularity of Verdi’s operas. Over the final three decades of the nineteenth century, moreover, London’s musical milieu underwent changes of great magnitude, shifting the manner in which Verdi was conceptualized and making room for the powerful influence of Wagner. Nostalgic commentators began to lament the sad state of the Land of Song, referring to the now departed "palmy days of Italian opera." Zicari charts this entire cultural constellation. Verdi in Victorian London is required reading for both academics and opera aficionados. Music specialists will value a historical reconstruction that stems from a large body of first-hand source material, while Verdi lovers and Italian opera addicts will enjoy vivid analysis free from technical jargon. For students, scholars and plain readers alike, this book is an illuminating addition to the study of music reception.

Charles Booth's London Poverty Maps

Charles Booth's London Poverty Maps PDF Author: Iain Sinclair
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 9780500022290
Category : SOCIAL SCIENCE
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This insightful, evocative, and sumptuous volume brings Charles Booth's landmark survey of late nineteenth-century London to a new audience.

London Labour and the London Poor

London Labour and the London Poor PDF Author: Henry Mayhew
Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.
ISBN: 1605207330
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
Assembled from a series of newspaper articles first published in the newspaper *Morning Chronicle* throughout the 1840s, this exhaustively researched, richly detailed survey of the teeming street denizens of London is a work both of groundbreaking sociology and salacious voyeurism. In an 1850 review of the survey, just prior to its initial book publication, William Makepeace Thackeray called it "tale of terror and wonder" offering "a picture of human life so wonderful, so awful, so piteous and pathetic, so exciting and terrible, that readers of romances own they never read anything like to it." Delving into the world of the London "street-folk"-the buyers and sellers of goods, performers, artisans, laborers and others-this extraordinary work inspired the socially conscious fiction of Charles Dickens in the 19th century as well as the urban fantasy of Neil Gaiman in the late 20th. Volume I explores the lives of: the "wandering tribes" costermongers sellers of fish, fruits and vegetables sellers of books and stationery sellers of manufactured goods women and children on the streets and more. English journalist HENRY MAYHEW (1812-1887) was a founder and editor of the satirical magazine *Punch.*