Building Jerusalem
The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From Manchester's deadly cotton works to London's literary salons, a brilliant exploration of how the Victorians created the modern city
Since Charles Dickens first described Coketown in Hard Times, the nineteenth-century city, born of the industrial revolution, has been a byword for deprivation, pollution, and criminality. Yet, as historian Tristram Hunt argues in this powerful new history, the Coketowns of the 1800s were far more than a monstrous landscape of factories and tenements. By 1851, more than half of Britain's population lived in cities, and even as these pioneers confronted a frightening new way of life, they produced an urban flowering that would influence the shape of cities for generations to come.
Drawing on diaries, newspapers, and classic works of fiction, Hunt shows how the Victorians translated their energy and ambition into realizing an astonishingly grand vision of the utopian city on a hill—the new Jerusalem. He surveys the great civic creations, from town halls to city squares, sidewalks, and even sewers, to reveal a story of middle-class power and prosperity and the liberating mission of city life. Vowing to emulate the city-states of Renaissance Italy, the Victorians worked to turn even the smokestacks of Manchester and Birmingham into sites of freedom and art. And they succeeded—until twentieth-century decline transformed wealthy metropolises into dangerous inner cities.
An original history of proud cities and confident citizens, Building Jerusalem depicts an unrivaled era that produced one of the great urban civilizations of Western history.
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.