Like her previous books, this book is the product of the author’s passionate interest in the realities of everyday life – and the conditions in which most people lived – so often left out of history books. This period of mid Victorian London covers a huge span: Victoria’s wedding and the place of the royals in popular esteem; how the very poor lived, the underworld, prostitution, crime, prisons and transportation; the public utilities – Bazalgette on sewers and road design, Chadwick on pollution and sanitation; private charities – Peabody, Burdett Coutts – and workhouses; new terraced housing and transport, trains, omnibuses and the Underground; furniture and decor; families and the position of women; the prosperous middle classes and their new shops, e.g. Peter Jones, Harrods; entertaining and servants, food and drink; unlimited liability and bankruptcy; the rich, the marriage market, taxes and anti-semitism; the Empire, recruitment and press-gangs. The period begins with the closing of the Fleet and Marshalsea prisons and ends with the first (steam-operated) Underground trains and the first Gilbert & Sullivan.
Read by Anton Lesser
(p) 2005 Orion Publishing Group
Read by Anton Lesser
(p) 2005 Orion Publishing Group
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Reviews
Picard enjoys recounting the gruesome daily mechanics of living in what Cobbett described as "the great wen"
She cannot be denied her bid for the heavyweight crown. She writes the old history, descriptive and unanalytical, painted in exhilarating colours
This book is a feast of tit-bits, bringing 19th-century London to life piecemeal with the accumulation of facts ... a valuable addition to the literature of London
Vividness is the book's aim, and this is achieved splendidly
Thus the book proceeds, by typifying anecdotes, which are well chosen and impeccably annotated, and all linked together by Picard's untroubling, readable prose
A wonderful achievement
Liza Picard's Victorian London is a mine of information and very readable
She is an engaging companion, always wondering out loud about the sort of questions which you've asked yourself ... an enjoyable book
I was delighted, as usual, by Liza Picard's Victorian London, the fourth of her grand series on life in the capital
This is a comprehensive history by anecdote, so the enlightening facts come thick and fast, from the suggestion that Queen Victoria had a slight German accent to the idea that linoleum is best washed with milk. And while there is certainly no pretence at some grand narrative, there is a genuine sense of time and place. It makes it a book to pick at - where else could one find out about velocipedes, costermongers and the "Monster School"? - but it's also one that adds incalculable depth to a walk round the capital. From houses to cemeteries, Picard enforces the idea that history really is all around us
The glories of Picard's magpie style are immediately apparent. She paints a picture with deft, sure strokes, then finds the perfect quotation
Whether she is describing the music halls, such as the Alhambra in Leicester Square, or the criminal underworld, or the foundation of London University, or the lives of the costermongers, or the expansion of the middle-class suburbs, she never loses her eye for the telling detail. Reading her book is like gazing at one of those energetic, crowded canvases by the Victorian painter William Powel Frith, who brought the age to life through a multiplicity of detail
Her vivid panorama of London between 1840 and 1870
