Building Jerusalem
The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
'History writing at its compulsive best' A. N. Wilson
This is a history of the ideas that shaped not only London, but Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield and other power-houses of 19th-century Britain. It charts the controversies and visions that fostered Britain's greatest civic renaissance.
Tristram Hunt explores the horrors of the Victorian city, as seen by Dickens, Engels and Carlyle; the influence of the medieval Gothic ideal of faith, community and order espoused by Pugin and Ruskin; the pride in self-government, identified with the Saxons as opposed to the Normans; the identification with the city republics of the Italian renaissance - commerce, trade and patronage; the change from the civic to the municipal, and greater powers over health, education and housing; and finally at the end of the century, the retreat from the urban to the rural ideal, led by William Morris and the garden-city movement of Ebenezer Howard.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
We think we have culture wars today, but our world is peaceful compared to 19th-century England as portrayed by Hunt in this comprehensive study of the emergence of the modern city. Hunt, a historian at the University of London, examines the many antagonistic political and aesthetic movements vying for dominance as the Victorian city took shape. In the 1830s, rural masses migrating to the industrial cities found rampant disease, extreme want and a life expectancy as low as 30 years. In response, some argued nostalgically for a return to medieval patterns of life or a resurgence of Saxon traditions of local autonomy. Others preached a municipal gospel, stressing a duty of serving the community through public office or participating in the myriad voluntary associations created to promote education, public health and the morality of the working poor. Hunt devotes lively chapters to these and other responses to Victorian urban life. He finds that none provided a lasting solution, as the cities of England and Scotland sank into drab suburbanism in thrall to the "metropolitan imperialism" of London. Demonstrating a remarkable command of literature, political history and architectural criticism, Hunt (who is all of 31) brings a long-departed era vigorously to life. 16 pages of b&w illus.
