Walking the Victorian Streets

Walking the Victorian Streets PDF Author: Deborah Epstein Nord
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501729233
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Literary traditions of urban description in the nineteenth century revolve around the figure of the stroller, a man who navigates and observes the city streets with impunity. Whether the stroller appears as fictional character, literary persona, or the nameless, omnipresent narrator of panoramic fiction, he casts the woman of the streets in a distinctive role. She functions at times as a double for the walker's marginal and alienated self and at others as connector and contaminant, carrier of the literal and symbolic diseases of modern urban life. In Walking the Victorian Streets, Deborah Epstein Nord explores the way in which the female figure is used as a marker for social suffering, poverty, and contagion in texts by De Quincey, Lamb, Pierce Egan, and Dickens. What, then, of the female walker and urban chronicler? While the male spectator enjoyed the ability to see without being seen, the female stroller struggled to transcend her role as urban spectacle and her association with sexual transgression. In novels, nonfiction, and poetry by Elizabeth Gaskell1 Flora Tristan, Margaret Harkness, Amy Levy, Maud Pember Reeves, Beatrice Webb, Helen Bosanquet, and others, Nord locates the tensions felt by the female spectator conscious of herself as both observer and observed. Finally, Walking the Victorian Streets considers the legacy of urban rambling and the uses of incognito in twentieth-century texts by George Orwell and Virginia Woolf.

Walking the Victorian Streets

Walking the Victorian Streets PDF Author: Deborah Epstein Nord
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501729233
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Literary traditions of urban description in the nineteenth century revolve around the figure of the stroller, a man who navigates and observes the city streets with impunity. Whether the stroller appears as fictional character, literary persona, or the nameless, omnipresent narrator of panoramic fiction, he casts the woman of the streets in a distinctive role. She functions at times as a double for the walker's marginal and alienated self and at others as connector and contaminant, carrier of the literal and symbolic diseases of modern urban life. In Walking the Victorian Streets, Deborah Epstein Nord explores the way in which the female figure is used as a marker for social suffering, poverty, and contagion in texts by De Quincey, Lamb, Pierce Egan, and Dickens. What, then, of the female walker and urban chronicler? While the male spectator enjoyed the ability to see without being seen, the female stroller struggled to transcend her role as urban spectacle and her association with sexual transgression. In novels, nonfiction, and poetry by Elizabeth Gaskell1 Flora Tristan, Margaret Harkness, Amy Levy, Maud Pember Reeves, Beatrice Webb, Helen Bosanquet, and others, Nord locates the tensions felt by the female spectator conscious of herself as both observer and observed. Finally, Walking the Victorian Streets considers the legacy of urban rambling and the uses of incognito in twentieth-century texts by George Orwell and Virginia Woolf.

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.

Walking Dickensian London

Walking Dickensian London PDF Author: Richard Jones
Publisher: Interlink Books
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Charles Dickens and London are inextricably linked. The world-famous English writer lived in London for much of his life and is buried in Westminster Abbey. And it was London and its inhabitants thatprovided Dickens with the inspiration for so many of his works. Walking Dickensian London allows you to visit the locations mentioned in his works and to see the development of Victorian London. Additional routes offer an escape to Cobham or Rochester for a longer country stroll and to discover more about the places where Dickens spent his happy early childhood and retired in his final years. Each walk takes you through an area used as the setting for one or more of Dickens's novels, from the peaceful, cobble-stoned, and lamp-lit Inns of Court featured in Great Expectations to the slums of Holborn portrayed in Oliver Twist. Along the way, you will see the homes of the Victorian great and good, as well as those of the lowlier characters, who made an impression on Dickens in both his personal and professional life. There is also an opportunity to sample authentic fare at the public houses that Dickens frequented. Together with 19th-century engravings and pertinent excerpts from Dickens's works, Richard Jones takes you back in time to the once crowded Docklands, where the river thronged with clippers trading goods from around the world, and the elite of Holland Park with their garden parties and literary dinners. Illustrated with atmospheric color photographs, which capture the pockets of Dickensian London still evident today, Walking Dickensian London is the perfect companion to discovering the London that Dickens knew so well. ... Publisher description.

Nightwalking

Nightwalking PDF Author: Matthew Beaumont
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178168796X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
“Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night,” wrote the poet Rupert Brooke. Before the age of electricity, the nighttime city was a very different place to the one we know today—home to the lost, the vagrant and the noctambulant. Matthew Beaumont recounts an alternative history of London by focusing on those of its denizens who surface on the streets when the sun’s down. If nightwalking is a matter of “going astray” in the streets of the metropolis after dark, then nightwalkers represent some of the most suggestive and revealing guides to the neglected and forgotten aspects of the city. In this brilliant work of literary investigation, Beaumont shines a light on the shadowy perambulations of poets, novelists and thinkers: Chaucer and Shakespeare; William Blake and his ecstatic peregrinations and the feverish ramblings of opium addict Thomas De Quincey; and, among the lamp-lit literary throng, the supreme nightwalker Charles Dickens. We discover how the nocturnal city has inspired some and served as a balm or narcotic to others. In each case, the city is revealed as a place divided between work and pleasure, the affluent and the indigent, where the entitled and the desperate jostle in the streets. With a foreword and afterword by Will Self, Nightwalking is a captivating literary portrait of the writers who explore the city at night and the people they meet.

The Victorian City

The Victorian City PDF Author: Judith Flanders
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1466835451
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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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.

Melbourne Circle

Melbourne Circle PDF Author: Nick Gadd
Publisher: Australian Scholarly Publishing
ISBN: 1922454079
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Over two years, writer Nick Gadd and his wife Lynne circled the city of Melbourne on foot, starting at Williamstown and ending in Port Melbourne. Along the way they uncovered lost buildings, secret places and mysterious signs that told of forgotten stories and curious characters from the past. Soon after they completed the circle, Lynne passed away from cancer. Melbourne Circle is the story of their journey, a memoir, and a stunning meditation on personal loss. ‘What a gem this book is! Oddity, wonderment, weirdness: these splendid essays reveal a marvellous Melbourne most of us have never encountered before. This is a psychogeography dense with vernacular history, humane detail, and from beneath the shadow of grief, love.’ –­ Gail Jones, author of Five Bells and The Death of Noah Glass ‘‘‘Psychojogging”’ and the pleasures of walking.’ – interview with Hilary Harper on Radio National, Life Matters ‘Marvellous Melbourne: the books that capture our city and its life.’ – The Age/Sydney Morning Herald ‘Melbourne Circle: Walking, Memory and Loss is a very special book. Just read it, and then take to the streets and walk with the same spirit of enquiry.’ – Sophie Cunningham, The Age ‘A beautiful meditation on the streets in which we live, ghosts, love and loss … While there is sadness in this book, Gadd writes with warmth, humour and a generosity of spirit.’ – Stephen Romei, The Weekend Australian ‘An endearing book about enduring love and serendipitous discoveries; of remnants of the past pasted onto old buildings, and the way these ghost signs are portals into another time.’ – The Saturday Paper

The Victorian Underworld

The Victorian Underworld PDF Author: Kellow Chesney
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780140139709
Category : Criminals
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
Beneath the respectable surface of Victorian England lay a criminal world as diverse, turbulent and vicious as any. This begins by looking at that age and its penal methods and it then recreates the showmen, religious fakes, garrotters, pickpockets, prostitutes and magsmen who thronged the murky rookeries and lays of the cities.

Walking London. The Best of the City

Walking London. The Best of the City PDF Author: Brian Robinson
Publisher: Edizioni WhiteStar
ISBN: 8854419311
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
These handy, take-along walking guides--filled with essential maps, inspirational photos, and insider tips--showcase the world's great cities in a practical, streamlined, itinerary-driven format. The best way to see and appreciate the sights of London is to walk, absorbing all the energy and vibrancy of the city. This guide offers 15 itineraries, accompanying the reader step by step on a journey of discovery in the company of expert travel writers, all true Londoners, who explain the most important monuments of the city. The "Whirlwind Visit" section includes schedules for visiting the entire city in one day or in a weekend, for solo travel and family outings. The walks go from The City to Westminster and from Kensington to Knightsbridge, touching on all the sites shown on the maps. Each "Walking Tour" is complete with maps and walking times; the underground stations where the tours start are clearly marked. There are detailed descriptions of museums and other destinations, including Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's Cathedral, and the National Gallery, with tips on what to see and how to plan a visit. This insider guide will introduce the reader to the most intimate aspects of the city: Royal London, Shakespeare's London, and London pubs: there will be no doubt why this city is considered one of the best in the world.

Walking Jane Austen’s London

Walking Jane Austen’s London PDF Author: Louise Allen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0747813892
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
From prize-winning historical novelist Louise Allen, this book presents nine walks through both the London Jane Austen knew and the London of her novels! Follow in Jane's footsteps to her publisher's doorstep and the Prince Regent's vanished palace, see where she stayed when she was correcting proofs of Sense and Sensibility and accompany her on a shopping expedition – and afterwards to the theatre. In modern London the walker can still visit the church where Lydia Bennett married Wickham, stroll with Elinor Dashwood in Kensington Palace Gardens or imagine they follow Jane's naval officer brothers as they stride down Whitehall to the Admiralty. From well-known landmarks to hidden corners, these walks reveal a lost London that can still come alive in vivid detail for the curious visitor, who will discover eighteenth-century chop houses, elegant squares, sinister prisons, bustling city streets and exclusive gentlemen's clubs amongst innumerable other Austen-esque delights.

Mary Barton, a Tale of Manchester Life

Mary Barton, a Tale of Manchester Life PDF Author: Elisabeth-Cleghorn Gaskell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description