Drinking a glass of tap water, strolling in a park, hopping a train for the suburbs: some aspects of city life are so familiar that we don’t think twice about them. But such simple actions are structured by complex relationships with our natural world. The contours of these relationships—social, cultural, political, economic, and legal—were established during America’s first great period of urbanization in the nineteenth century, and Boston, one of the earliest cities in America, often led the nation in designing them. A richly textured cultural and social history of the development of nineteenth-century Boston, this book provides a new environmental perspective on the creation of America’s first cities. Eden on the Charles explores how Bostonians channeled country lakes through miles of pipeline to provide clean water; dredged the ocean to deepen the harbor; filled tidal flats and covered the peninsula with houses, shops, and factories; and created a metropolitan system of parks and greenways, facilitating the conversion of fields into suburbs. The book shows how, in Boston, different class and ethnic groups brought rival ideas of nature and competing visions of a “city upon a hill” to the process of urbanization—and were forced to conform their goals to the realities of Boston’s distinctive natural setting. The outcomes of their battles for control over the city’s development were ultimately recorded in the very fabric of Boston itself. In Boston’s history, we find the seeds of the environmental relationships that—for better or worse—have defined urban America to this day.

An extensively illustrated, comprehensive exploration of the architecture and development of Old Cambridge from colonial settlement to bustling intersection of town and gown. Old Cambridge is the traditional name of the once-isolated community that grew up around the early settlement of Newtowne, which served briefly as the capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and then became the site of Harvard College. This abundantly illustrated volume from the Cambridge Historical Commission traces the development of the neighborhood as it became a suburban community and bustling intersection of town and gown. Based on the city's comprehensive architectural inventory and drawing extensively on primary sources, Building Old Cambridge considers how the social, economic, and political history of Old Cambridge influenced its architecture and urban development. Old Cambridge was famously home to such figures as the proscribed Tories William Brattle and John Vassall; authors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Dean Howells; publishers Charles C. Little, James Brown, and Henry O. Houghton; developer Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a founder of Bell Telephone; and Charles Eliot, the landscape architect. Throughout its history, Old Cambridge property owners have engaged some of the country's most talented architects, including Peter Harrison, H. H. Richardson, Eleanor Raymond, Carl Koch, and Benjamin Thompson. The authors explore Old Cambridge's architecture and development in the context of its social and economic history; the development of Harvard Square as a commercial center and regional mass transit hub; the creation of parks and open spaces designed by Charles Eliot and the Olmsted Brothers; and the formation of a thriving nineteenth-century community of booksellers, authors, printers, and publishers that made Cambridge a national center of the book industry. Finally, they examine Harvard's relationship with Cambridge and the community's often impassioned response to the expansive policies of successive Harvard administrations.

Charles Simeon ministered for over fifty years in one parish at the heart of Cambridge during the bleak period of English national life between the French Wars and the passing of the Reform Bill. He was considered by Lord Macaulay to have had greater influence on the life of the church than any primate. Soundly converted in his first term at King's College, he was appointed Vicar of Holy Trinity in 1782, combining the incumbency with a Fellowship and various academic posts. Highly unpopular at first on account of both his message and his manner, scorned and abused for many years, he carried on regardless of other's opinions until in the end he became perhaps the best known and best respected name in Cambridge. Hot-tempered but warm-hearted, impetuous but infinitely patient, a man of imposing, even remarkable appearance, he was a "character," about whom the most entertaining stories are eagerly recounted. As a Christian of independent mind and strong convictions, he found his spiritual strength in a lifetime of deep devotion and strict personal discipline; as a biblical preacher he was the first for many generations to see the possibility and importance of teaching others how to expound the Scriptures; as a pastor and evangelist his work with both town and gown was marked by a rare faithfulness and zeal. Limited all his life to the one center of spiritual activity, he yet was the moving spirit in the formation of the Church Missionary Society, and an enthusiastic supporter of the Bible Society and of work among the Jews.

The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens contains fourteen specially-commissioned chapters by leading international scholars, who together provide diverse but complementary approaches to the full span of Dickens's work, with particular focus on his major fiction. The essays cover the whole range of Dickens's writing, from Sketches by Boz through The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Separate chapters address important thematic topics: childhood, the city, and domestic ideology. Others consider formal features of the novels, including their serial publication and Dickens's distinctive use of language. Three final chapters examine Dickens in relation to work in other media: illustration, theatre, and film. Each essay provides guidance to further reading. The volume as a whole offers a valuable introduction to Dickens for students and general readers, as well as fresh insights, informed by recent critical theory, that will be of interest to scholars and teachers of the novels.

Charles Dickens became immensely popular early on in his career as a novelist, and his appeal continues to grow with new editions prompted by recent television and film adaptations, as well as large numbers of students studying the Victorian novel. This lively and accessible introduction to Dickens focuses on the extraordinary diversity of his writing. Jon Mee discusses Dickens's novels, journalism and public performances, the historical contexts and his influence on other writers. In the process, five major themes emerge: Dickens the entertainer; Dickens and language; Dickens and London; Dickens, gender, and domesticity; and the question of adaptation, including Dickens's adaptations of his own work. These interrelated concerns allow readers to start making their own new connections between his famous and less widely read works and to appreciate fully the sheer imaginative richness of his writing, which particularly evokes the dizzying expansion of nineteenth-century London.

Charles Darwin's years as a student at the University of Cambridge were some of the most important and formative of his life. Thereafter he always felt a particular affection for Cambridge. For a time he even considered a Cambridge professorship as a career and sent three of his sons there to be educated. Unfortunately the remaining traces of what Darwin actually did and experienced in Cambridge have long remained undiscovered. Consequently his day-to-day life there has remained unknown and misunderstood. This book is based on new research, including newly discovered manuscripts and Darwin publications, and gathers together recollections of those who knew Darwin as a student. This book therefore reveals Darwin's time in Cambridge in unprecedented detail.

Virgil became a school author in his own lifetime and the centre of the Western canon for the next 1800 years, exerting a major influence on European literature, art, and politics. This Companion is designed as an indispensable guide for anyone seeking a fuller understanding of an author critical to so many disciplines. It consists of essays by seventeen scholars from Britain, the USA, Ireland and Italy which offer a range of different perspectives both traditional and innovative on Virgil's works, and a renewed sense of why Virgil matters today. The Companion is divided into four main sections, focussing on reception, genre, context, and form. This ground-breaking book not only provides a wealth of material for an informed reading but also offers sophisticated insights which point to the shape of Virgilian scholarship and criticism to come.