Walking the Victorian Streets

2018-09-05 Literary Criticism

Author : Deborah Epstein Nord
Release : 2018-09-05
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 233/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Walking the Victorian Streets by : Deborah Epstein Nord

Download or read book Walking the Victorian Streets written by Deborah Epstein Nord. This book was released on 2018-09-05. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

2014-01-01 History

Author : Lee Jackson
Release : 2014-01-01
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 053/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Dirty Old London by : Lee Jackson

Download or read book Dirty Old London written by Lee Jackson. This book was released on 2014-01-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Nightwalking

2015-03-24 History

Author : Matthew Beaumont
Release : 2015-03-24
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 96X/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Nightwalking by : Matthew Beaumont

Download or read book Nightwalking written by Matthew Beaumont. This book was released on 2015-03-24. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A captivating literary portrait of London explored at night by some of the city’s most iconic writers throughout history “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 fascinating literary exploration of the writers who traverse the city at night and the people they meet.

Walking Dickensian London

2005-03 Literary Criticism

Author : Richard Jones
Release : 2005-03
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : /5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Walking Dickensian London by : Richard Jones

Download or read book Walking Dickensian London written by Richard Jones. This book was released on 2005-03. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

The Victorian City

2014-07-15 History

Author : Judith Flanders
Release : 2014-07-15
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 451/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Victorian City by : Judith Flanders

Download or read book The Victorian City written by Judith Flanders. This book was released on 2014-07-15. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

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