Show Less Product DetailsĪ quite extraordinary book, which I read with much enjoyment: an intoxicating blend of London, life and literature. No one who reads it will view London in the same light again.

Read more portrait of everyday life on the streets, bringing to life the Victorian capital in all its variety, vibrancy, and squalor. Now, Judith Flanders follows in his footsteps, leading us through the markets, transport systems, sewers, slums, cemeteries, gin palaces and entertainment emporia of Dickens' London. Charles Dickens obsessively walked London's streets, recording its pleasures, curiosities and cruelties. In only a few decades, London grew from a Regency town to the biggest city the world had ever seen, with more than 6.5 million people and railways, street-lighting and new buildings at every turn. The nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented transformation, and nowhere was this more apparent than on the streets of London.

BIC Classification: 1DBKESL 3JH HBJD1 HBLL HBTB. Even if you've read Dickens and the contemporary historians of the poor, there is still more to marvel at here.' Sebastian Faulks, Mail on Sunday Books of the Year Num Pages: 544 pages. Full of detail and colour about everyday life in Dickens's London, and leaves you with a sense not only of how hard life was then, but how strange. This well-researched sociological overview provides highly detailed context for cultural touchstones, while shattering the popular yet inauthentic image of a pristine Victorian age that never existed.Description for The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London Paperback. While Dickens typically hewed close to reality in his work, Flanders’s expertise shines when exposing Dickens’s embellishments, particularly when his character Fagin faces execution rather than the less powerful but more realistic punishment of deportment. Only the somewhat abrupt ending, after a segment on suicides, feels incomplete. The book is divided into four comprehensive sections, covering topics like urban water and road transportation systems, affordable entertainment, and the wide range of linguistic dialects. This information-packed profile of Victorian London offers renewed insight into Dickens’s youth as an imprisoned debtor’s working child his love of walking the city’s winding streets and finally, the reality behind the traumatic adventures of such well-known characters as Oliver Twist. Charles Dickens grimly portrayed Londoners as people resigned to hardscrabble living, ubiquitous filth, and prevalent violence, and Flanders ( The Invention of Murder) successfully recreates the feel of London at Dickens’s peak as she delves deep into the rhythms and architecture of particular neighborhoods.

The Victorian City by Judith Flanders