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The Victorian City
The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London | Judith Flanders
From the bestselling popular historian comes a masterly recreation of Victorian London, whose raucous streets and teeming denizens inspired and permeated the works of one of Britain's - and the world's - greatest novelists: Charles Dickens. The nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented transformation, and nowhere was this more apparent than on the streets of London. 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. In The Victorian House, Judith Flanders described in intimate detail what went on inside the nineteenth-century home. Now, in The Victorian City, she explores London's outdoors in an extraordinary, revelatory portrait of everyday life on the streets. From the moment Charles Dickens, the century's best-loved 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 colourful cries of street-sellers to the uncomfortable reality of travel by omnibus, via the many uses for the body parts of dead horses or the unimaginably grueling working days of hawker children, no detail is too small, or too strange. No one who reads Judith Flanders's The Victorian City will view London in the same light again.
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Litsi
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This is a strong reference book about life during the early to mid 19th C London. It will add depth and color to your next Victorian novel read. You‘ll have a sense of just what it meant to go to a club or avoid the runaway pig on your walk to Covent Garden. It references contemporaneous books: London at Night, Life in London and the Rambles and Adventures of Rob Tallyho that seem worth reading. They appear to be the real Pickwicks. #classics

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jenniferw88
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Nelson's column could have been very different!
😂😂😂

GingerAntics Because mermaids play water polo everyday...obviously!!! 6y
swynn Since that image makes zero sense, I have to wonder whether "water-polo" was a Victorian euphemism for, well, something that does make sense. 6y
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jenniferw88
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This John Snow knows something! 😂😂😂

zsuzsanna_reads I didn't know about the pub, I'll have to watch out for it next time I'm in the area! 6y
sprainedbrain 😂😂😂 6y
julesG Strangely, I knew all that from years ago, when I wrote a seminar paper about cholera and its besties. 6y
Libby1 Did you know Dan and Peter Snow, the TV historian and the newsreader, are his descendants? 😃 6y
jenniferw88 @Libby1 I didn't know that 😀 6y
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jenniferw88
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Wood pavements were not a #success in the Victorian period! #SisforSeptember @CaliforniaCay

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helgagrace
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On street naming (and renaming) in Victorian London cc @surlyspice

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