Where to begin in such a work? On the street, of course, from just getting around, as most people did by foot, arriving for 12-hour-plus working shifts in a dusty mess and assaulted by a roar of noise to taking horse-drawn omnibuses, hackney coaches, mail coaches, cabs and so on, all susceptible to natural hazards like fog. In her prodigiously detailed work, British journalist Flanders ( The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Reveled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime, 2013, etc.) reminds readers that “Dickensian” changed in meaning from the early part of the author’s career-when it meant “comic”-to a posthumous sense of “grim” and “dark.” Indeed, Dickens, the tireless walker of the London streets, author of nimble imagination who composed several works at once, covered all of the city as the early Victorian era of “earnestness and endeavor” gave way to the “moving age” involving increased population, paralyzing traffic, industry, building and slums. No one who reads it will view London in the same light again.A well-stuffed compendium on the transformational era in the history of London that fed both Charles Dickens’ imagination and his well of outrage.įrom his first published work, Sketches by Boz (1836), set in pre-Victorian London, until his last, unfinished novel, Edwin Drood (1870), Dickens drew on the life and characters of his beloved city. The Victorian City is a revelatory 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 19th century was a time of unprecedented transformation, and nowhere was this more apparent than on the streets of London. From an acclaimed popular historian comes a masterly recreation of Victorian London, whose raucous streets and teeming denizens inspired and permeated the works of one of the world's greatest novelists: Charles Dickens

The Victorian City by Judith Flanders