A comparative study in urban history, Victorian Cities examines the 19th-century history of four developing cities in England in a period of rapid growth, with chapters on London and Melbourne and references to Los Angeles and Chicago as well.

In 1837, in England and Wales, there were only five provincial cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants. By 1891 there were twenty-three. Over the same period London s population more than doubled. In this companion volume to Victorian People and Victorian Things, Lord Briggs focuses on the cities of Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Middlesbrough, Melbourne (an example of a Victorian community overseas) and London, comparing and contrasting their social, political and topographical development. Full of illuminating detail, Victorian Cities presents a unique social, political and economic bird's-eye view of the past."

The arrival of the railway was one of the most far reaching events in the history of the Victorian city. The present study, based upon detailed case histories of Britain's five largest cities (London, Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool), shows how the railways gave Victorian cities their compact shape, influenced topography and character of their central districts, and determines the nature of suburban expansion. This book was first published in 1969.

This volume explores the complex aesthetic, cultural, and memory politics of urban representation and reconfiguration in neo-Victorian discourse and practice. Through adaptations of traditional city tropes – such as the palimpsest, the labyrinth, the femininised enigma, and the marketplace of desire – writers, filmmakers, and city planners resurrect, preserve, and rework nineteenth-century metropolises and their material traces while simultaneously Gothicising and fabricating ‘past’ urban realities to serve present-day wants, so as to maximise cities’ potential to generate consumption and profits. Within the cultural imaginary of the metropolis, this volume contends, the nineteenth century provides a prominent focalising lens that mediates our apperception of and engagement with postmodern cityscapes. From the site of capitalist romance and traumatic lieux de mémoire to theatre of postcolonial resistance and Gothic sensationalism, the neo-Victorian city proves a veritable Proteus evoking myriad creative responses but also crystallising persistent ethical dilemmas surrounding alienation, precarity, Othering, and social exclusion.

Victorian City is a study of the social and intellectual attitudes of Victorian society to the challenge of urbanization.

From the New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed author of The Invention of Murder, an extraordinary, revelatory portrait of everyday life on the streets of Dickens' London. The nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented change, and nowhere was this more apparent than London. In only a few decades, the capital grew from a compact Regency town into a sprawling metropolis of 6.5 million inhabitants, the largest city the world had ever seen. Technology—railways, street-lighting, and sewers—transformed both the city and the experience of city-living, as London expanded in every direction. Now Judith Flanders, one of Britain's foremost social historians, explores the world portrayed so vividly in Dickens' novels, showing life on the streets of London in colorful, fascinating detail.From the moment Charles Dickens, the century's best-loved English novelist and London's greatest observer, arrived in the city in 1822, he obsessively walked its streets, recording its pleasures, curiosities and cruelties. Now, with him, Judith Flanders leads us through the markets, transport systems, sewers, rivers, slums, alleys, cemeteries, gin palaces, chop-houses and entertainment emporia of Dickens' London, to reveal the Victorian capital in all its variety, vibrancy, and squalor. From the colorful cries of street-sellers to the uncomfortable reality of travel by omnibus, to the many uses for the body parts of dead horses and the unimaginably grueling working days of hawker children, no detail is too small, or too strange. No one who reads Judith Flanders's meticulously researched, captivatingly written The Victorian City will ever view London in the same light again.