The City (Victorian Literature)

Introduction

The 19th century saw the rise of the world’s first great metropolis, London, and the transformation of several northern British small towns into the first major industrial cities. These great cities offered the pleasures of anonymity and the dangers of alienation. Urbanization was both a great leveler and a producer of new classes such as the merchant, the professional classes, and the gentry. Perhaps the most important element in these developments was the railway, the building of which transformed the landscape, the cityscape, and individual lives. Though at the beginning of the century little could be recognized as modern, by the end all the elements that would identify the modern world were in place—seemingly infinite variety, endless change in the built environment, and startling contrasts, as well as overcrowding, dirt, noise, crime, poverty, and ostentatious display. New opportunities of all sorts also arose in these cities—for work, for criminal activity, for adventure, and for pleasure and distress. The Victorians themselves were both fascinated and horrified by their cities, especially London, which, though not an industrial city, also presented the combined effects of rapid and uncontrolled growth. The contradictory responses generated by all this change and development resulted in an impressive amount of writing, especially in the periodical press, which itself was a product of urbanization. Journalists, a new class dubbed the Fourth Estate, tried to gain an overview of the constantly changing city, and novelists devised narrative and symbolic ways to represent the totality of the city. Much of this work was about the social problems, but there were also many sketches that were full of delight at the variety and oddity of city life. Most serious scholarship on the Victorian city, however, began only after World War II, partly due to early-20th-century negative responses to the Victorians’ perceived moralistic values and limitations on personal development. Among the first to react against anti-Victorianism were campaigners seeking to preserve Victorian buildings—the founding of the Victorian Society in 1957 was a sign of this shift. Historians were not far behind in collecting and mining the archives not only of London but of all the great cities, especially Manchester. Literary scholars also began to analyze the impact of the city on literary and artistic production. Though the scholarly interest in urban history never ceased, later-20th-century scholars and critics also began to write about more-specific aspects of the city—gender, nationalism, race, and sectarianism.

General Overviews

The study of the 19th-century city was part of the post–World War II efforts to preserve Victorian buildings and interest in urban history. Among the earliest results of this interest was Briggs 1990 (first published in 1963), a study of five major cities, including one in Australia. This was followed by Dyos and Wolff 1973, a magisterial two-volume collection of essays on the Victorian city, which still is the place for all study of the Victorian city to begin. In the following three decades, various aspects of the Victorian city were subjected to major historical investigation and literary analysis, including articulation of the types of urban development (Waller 1984) and government and the various structures the city incorporated (Johnson and Pooley 1982). Other edited collections brought together essays on different aspects of the city, such as Morris and Rodger 1993 and Mancoff and Trela 1996. A sometimes useful but uneven website, Victorian Web, also contains a section on cities. Hill 2007 summarizes both old and new directions and methods in urban history.

Briggs, Asa. Victorian Cities. London: Penguin, 1990.
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One of the first indispensable books on Victorian cities. Includes discussions of Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Middlesbrough, Melbourne, and London. A balanced account of the achievements and failures of the 19th-century city. First published in 1963.
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Dyos, H. J., and Michael Wolff, eds. The Victorian City: Images and Realities. 2 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.
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Though almost forty years old as of the early 2010s, still an essential collection of essays on the Victorian city. In two volumes, with thirty-eight essays on all aspects of the subject by major scholars, 434 illustrations, and twenty maps. Emphasis on poverty and the working class.
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Hill, Kate. “Review Essay: Tales of the City, Discourse and Governance.” Journal of Urban History 34.1 (November 2007): 154–160.
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Review of Tristram Hunt’s Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (cited under The Industrial Cities) and Patrick Joyce’s The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (New York: Verso, 2003). Discusses new directions in urban history after development and class: intellectual history (Hunt) and developments in ideas of governance (Joyce).
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Johnson, J. H., and Colin G. Pooley, eds. The Structure of 19th-Century Cities. New York: St. Martin’s, 1982.
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Includes an introduction and ten chapters by major scholars, organized into three sections: housing and the urban environment, retailing and the urban economy, and the social structure of the town. Cities discussed include Cardiff, Huddersfield, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Merthyr Tidfil, Nottingham, Salford, Sheffield, and Wolverhampton.
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Mancoff, Debra, and D. J. Trela, eds. Victorian Urban Settings: Essays on the 19th-century City and Its Contexts. Literature and Society in Victorian Britain 1. New York: Garland, 1996.
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Thirteen essays, including an editors’ preface and an introduction, grouped into three broad categories: “Mapping the Victorian City,” “Constructing Identity in an Urban Setting,” and “Imagining the Victorian City.” Substantive references to London, Manchester, and Glasgow. Papers originally presented at the 1993 annual meeting of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association.
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Morris, R. J., and Richard Rodger, eds. The Victorian City: A Reader in British Urban History, 1820–1914. London and New York: Longman, 1993.
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Important collection of eleven essays on varied aspects of the city in general: sections on “The City and Its People,” “The Physical Fabric of the City,” and “The Social Fabric of the City.” Valuable introduction about the development of urban history and the 19th-century city.
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Victorian Web.
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Articles on a variety of English, Scottish, and Irish cities, with some bibliographies and links.
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Waller, P. J. Town, City, and Nation: England 1850–1914. OPUS. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
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Comprehensive analysis of development of English urban society in London, provincial cities, and manufacturing towns.
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The Built Environment

The explosive growth of cities throughout the Victorian period resulted in many opportunities for new structures of all sorts: religious, commercial, domestic, governmental, and commemorative. With these opportunities, there were also a variety of architectural styles that builders could draw on—neo-Greek, Renaissance, neo-Gothic, Palladian and, at the end of the century, Arts and Crafts, among others. As a result, Victorian architecture is eclectic, though there was definitely a Gothic revival for most of the century, the Houses of Parliament being a good example. There are, however, examples of all styles in urban monuments, institutions, houses, government buildings, public works, and the amazing railway terminals that were built throughout the century. Crucial in this development were the rapid technological advances, especially in the development of iron and glass, which enabled entirely new kinds of structures—one of the most important examples is the iron and glass Crystal Palace built for the Great Exhibition of 1851. A monumental project to survey all the buildings of England remains one of the best resources for information about the 19th-century built environment (Pevsner 1951–1974). A major urban historian wrote a detailed discussion of the growth of the built environment in London (Olsen 1979), while another work recovered the art and architecture of Manchester (Archer 1985). Tyack 1992 focused on the major government architect for the period. Another work linked architecture with efforts to reform working-class housing in the later period (Weiner 1994). As the British Empire spread, its varied architectural styles spread also, so that throughout the world there are examples of 19th-century British building styles, and Crinson 1996 discusses the impact of British architecture on the empire and the impact of the empire on British architecture.

Archer, John, ed. Art and Architecture in Victorian Manchester. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1985.
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Counters the view of Manchester being a city of wretched housing and belching chimneys, though it does so incompletely. Ten chapters; illustrated. Discussions of John Waterhouse’s town hall, the murals of Ford Madox Brown, the Art Treasures Exhibition of 1850, and the Rylands Library, as well as the architectural designs of Charles Barry and the Mancunian architect Thomas Worthington.
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Crinson, Mark. Empire Building: Orientalism and Victorian Architecture. London: Routledge, 1996.
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Lavishly illustrated study of the impact of Western architecture on the Middle East and that of Islamic and Byzantine architecture on the West, specifically Britain. Three chapters on Oriental influence on the building of the Reform Club in London, the Crystal Palace, and the various exhibits in the Great Exhibition, and four chapters on British architecture’s influences on Istanbul, Egypt, and Jerusalem.
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Olsen, Donald J. The Growth of Victorian London. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1979.
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On the built city and the displacement of Georgian London by Victorian London, with its commitment to the values of freedom, privacy, and individualism. Uses contemporary journals, plans, maps, photographs, and prints. Discusses Victorian hotels and restaurants, the department store, and the railway terminus.
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Pevsner, Nikolaus. The Buildings of England. 46 vols. London: Alan Lane, 1951–1974.
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The name “Pevsner’s Architectural Guides” was adopted for this series in 1998. The most inclusive description of the architecture of England in a county-by-county survey. An outgrowth of Pevsner’s work are various city guides of major Victorian cities by different authors, including Birmingham, Brighton and Hove, Bristol, Hull, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, and Sheffield. See the website for details.
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Tyack, Geoffrey. Sir James Pennethorne and the Making of Victorian London. Cambridge Studies in the History of Architecture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
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Thorough analysis of the life and work of the government architect for the first half of Victoria’s reign. Pennethorne was responsible for putting down new streets, laying out parks, and designing major public buildings. The book discusses the main architectural issues and controversies of the time and the relationship between government and architects.
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Weiner, Deborah. Architecture and Social Reform in Late-Victorian London. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1994.
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Focuses on the architecture associated with late Victorian reform movements, which were intended to replace working-class terrace houses with more spacious accommodation in Queen Anne, Elizabethan, and Arts and Crafts design. Good analysis of the social relations involved in the construction and use of these buildings and their embeddedness in a myth of a harmonious past.
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Culture and Representation

In addition to studies of the development of Victorian cities in the last fifty years, there have been important studies of culture in the cities. Coleman 1973 was an early collection of contemporary responses to the Victorian city and was designed for classroom use, a sign that study of the Victorian city was now part of the school curriculum. One of the most important studies of the impact of the city on the imagination of writers and readers, Williams 1973, appeared the same year. Pike 2005 is a recent look at the impact of underground spaces on the representation of the city. The interest in urban history also brought forward the importance of popular culture in the urban experience: Bailey 1998 uncovers the growing popular culture in the late Victorian period, whereas Handy 1995 discusses the responses to dirt and filth. Trumpener 2002 looks at children’s literature through the lens of Victorian young people’s guides to London. The discussion of an identifiable discourse created by the city, as explored in Young-Choi 2001, has been a recent critical development.

Bailey, Peter. Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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A collection of previously published essays on the popular entertainment industry in the late Victorian period and the issues of leisure. Thoroughly researched with many illustrations, this social history covers middle- and working-class attitudes toward leisure and respectability and specific entertainments, particularly the music hall, with an original study of the role of the bar maid.
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Coleman, Bruce Ivors, ed. The Idea of the City in 19th-Century Britain. Birth of Modern Britain. London and New York: Routledge, 1973.
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Fifty-three extracts of 19th-century commentary on the city, including London, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, and Glasgow, organized chronologically. Includes poetry, the novel, and essays from major Victorian writers. Designed for classroom use.
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Handy, Ellen. “Dust Piles and Damp Pavements: Excrement, Repression, and the Victorian City in Photography and Literature.” In Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination. Edited by Carol T. Christ and John O Jordan, 111–133. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
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Discusses how excrement is both repressed and represented. Concentrates on Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend and Thomas Annan’s photographs of Glasgow, though many references to other Victorian writers and reformers.
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Pike, David. Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005.
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How underground space—made up of drainage, railways, utility tunnels, and storage vaults—was represented in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a period when technology and heavy industry transformed urban life. Discusses how Dickens, Alice Meynell, George Gissing, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells integrated images of the urban underworld into the anatomy of modern society.
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Trumpener, Katie. “City Scenes, Commerce, Utopia, and the Birth of the Picture Book.” In The Victorian Illustrated Book. Edited by Richard Maxwell, 332–384. Victorian Literature and Culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002.
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A study of young persons’ guidebooks to London, which argues that these books construct children as flâneurs (idle walkers and observers of city life) and consumers. Demonstrates the power of illustrated books in creating a “utopia” of the city.
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Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Oxford University Press, 1973.
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An important early study that traces the “structures of feeling” in the intertwining of the two fundamental ways of life in relation to historical circumstances.
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Young-Choi, Tina. “Writing the Victorian City: Discourses of Risk, Connection, and Inevitability.” Victorian Studies 43.4 (Summer 2001): 561–589.
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Discusses how statistics came to occupy a respectable place in everyday discourse and how a new conception of risk emerged from the literature of urban exploration and social statistics. Focuses on discussions of disease and the urban poor. Available online to subscribers.
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Bibliographies

All scholarly books on the Victorian city have many secondary references either in bibliographies or notes. There are in addition some works that attempt a more comprehensive bibliographical record. Some focus on the Victorian city at large (Morris and Rodger 1993, Urban History), others focus mainly on London (Creaton 1996, Humpherys 2002), and one earlier bibliography focuses on Manchester (Wyke 1985). The website Victorian London also contains a selective bibliography of 19th-century materials.

Creaton, Heather. London. World Bibliographical Series 189. Oxford: Clio Press, 1996.
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Part of the World Bibliographical Series. Fifteen annotated entries on 19th-century London, with other topical sections.
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Humpherys, Anne. “Knowing the Victorian City: Writing and Representation.” Victorian Literature and Culture 30 (2002): 601–612.
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Survey of critical work on London from the 1960s through 2001.
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Morris, R. J., and Richard Rodger. “Select Bibliography.” In The Victorian City: A Reader in British Urban History, 1820–1914. Edited by R. J. Morris and Richard Rodger, 364–376. London and New York: Longman, 1993.
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A twelve-page bibliography of key secondary works organized thematically: “General,” “Population and Migration,” “Work and Employment,” “Housing, Health and the Built Environment,” “Transport and Communications,” “Class, Community and Neighborhood,” “The Moral Environment: Education, Religion and Crime,” “Politics, Government, and Municipal Administration,” and “Leisure and Recreation.”
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Urban History.
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Originally published from 1972 to 1991 as the Urban History Yearbook, this journal covers research on all periods and places. Annual compilation of bibliography of more than a thousand entries is searchable.
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Victorian London.
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Victorian London website. Contains many links to full-text pieces by 19th-century writers.
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Wyke, T. J. “19th Century Manchester: A Preliminary Bibliography.” In City, Class and Culture: Studies of Social Policy and Cultural Production in Victorian Manchester. Edited by Alan J. Kidd and K. W. Roberts, 218–271. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1985.
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Lists 1,200 items grouped into twenty-seven categories, including “General Histories,” “Population,” “Ethnic Minorities,” “Economic History,” “Textiles,” “Engineering,” “Banking,” “Transport,” “Politics,” “Labor History,” “Poverty and Housing,” “Poor Law,” “Public Health,” “Crime,” “Religion,” “Education,” “Science,” “Leisure,” “Literature,” “Newspapers,” “Libraries and Museums,” and “Art and Architecture.”
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Maps

The mapping of London, and to a lesser degree other major cities, was an important activity during the 19th century, but it was a difficult task because of continual growth and change. Arguably, the most important effort was that of Edward Stanford in 1862 (see Stanford, et al. 2003), who used the ordinance survey to map London. Other maps of London included the inclusive, large-scale ordnance map of Bacon, completed in 1888 (see Bacon 1987), and that drawn by R. Jarman in 1857 (see Map of John Snow’s London in 1859), connected to the epidemiology map of John Snow. More specialized maps include Booth’s famous map of poverty in late-19th-century London (1886–1903; see Booth 1889) and those that were part of G. F. Chadwick’s classic essay on Manchester (Chadwick 1973). A more analytical work discusses the impact of mapping on the construction of London as a metropolis (Gilbert 2004).

Bacon, George W. The A to Z of Victorian London. London Topographical Society 136. Lymph Castle, UK: Margary, 1987.
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Consists of fifty-nine map sheets from Bacon’s New Large-Scale Ordnance Atlas of London & Suburbs, 1888. The index shows every street, road, lane, wharf, and public building. Detail includes banks, theaters, insurance houses, statues, and named terraces.
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Booth, Charles. “Descriptive Map of London Poverty.” In Labour and Life of the People. Vol. 1, East London. By Charles Booth. London: Macmillan, 1889.
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Probably the most well-known product of Booth’s inquiry. An early example of social cartography, with each street colored to indicate the income and social class of its inhabitants. See the Booth archive
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Chadwick, G. F. “The Face of the Industrial City: Two Looks at Manchester.” In The Victorian City: Images and Realities. Vol. 1. Edited by H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, 247–256. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.
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The development of Manchester, first in 1850 and then in 1891, by one of the founders of the urban history movement. Contains maps of Manchester in 1850.
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Gilbert, Pamela. Mapping the Victorian Social Body. Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004.
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A detailed analysis of the impact of mapping, particularly of cholera outbreaks, on the construction of London as a metropolis. Includes discussion of John Snow’s epidemiological map, which was based on that of James Reynolds. Also includes a section on Dickens, who drew heavily on these maps.
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Map of John Snow’s London in 1859.
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Shows “Reynolds’s Map of Modern London,” drawn by Richard Jarman in 1857, hand colored, and divided into quarter-mile sections. The site also includes other maps connected to John Snow, a 19th-century epidemiologist.
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Stanford, Edward, Ralph Hyde, and Patrick Mannix. Find Your Way Round Mid-Victorian London: Edward Stanford’s Library Map of London and Its Suburbs, 1862. CD-ROM. 3d rev. ed. Guilford, UK: Motco Enterprises, 2003.
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Stanford used the Ordnance Survey’s 12-inch-to-the-mile map, which had been produced in outline for the Metropolitan Commissioners of Sewers, and sent his own surveyors out to complete the detail. The most important map of mid-Victorian London, with an index of more than 18,000 street and other names, and more detailed than the modern A–Z. For sale at the publisher’s website.
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The Working Class and the Poor

A great deal of the 19th-century writing, both journalistic and literary, was an effort to portray and understand the poverty and working conditions of the crowds of internal migrants who came into London and the industrial cities from the rural areas. This emphasis has continued into the 21st century. Novelists, sketch writers, and scholars frequently concentrated on the London slums. Three important studies appeared in the 1970s: Jones 1971 was one of the first to discuss the relationship of class to urbanization, using the casual poor as its main focus; Wohl 1977 produced a definitive study of the working-class housing issues; and Himmelfarb 1978 analyzed the generally negative images of the poor created by contemporary writers. Later scholarship still focused on the working class and the poor, though Rodger 2000 juxtaposed the development of the slum with the evolution of the suburb. Joyce 2003 is a social history that integrates discussion of social investigations and fiction in terms of class and crime, while Wise 2009 studied in detail one particular slum in London. An impressive combination of historical research and literary analysis (Koven 2004) discussed both the reformers and social workers who visited the slums and the experiences of slum dwellers in fiction and in life. McCalman 1988, an original and thoroughly researched study of an underworld of political radicals in the early part of the century (whose revolutionary ideas were enabled by the anonymity of London), traced the evolution of the radical underground press in London into the shady pornographic press.

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. “The Culture of Poverty.” In The Victorian City: Images and Realities. Vol. 2, Shapes on the Ground and a Change of Accent. Edited by H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, 707–736. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.
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On Henry Mayhew’s investigations of workers, the street folk, and the poor in London at the middle of the 19th century. Also treats some of his contemporary social investigators and sketch writers. Critical of his work; sees him as a product of his time.
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Jones, Gareth Stedman. Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
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Using the casual poor, studies their relationship to the labor market, housing, and middle-class London. An important early analysis of class as related to urbanization.
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Joyce, Simon. Capital Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London. Victorian Literature and Culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.
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Combines discussions of social investigation and fiction in late Victorian London. Creates a “literary geography.”
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Koven, Seth. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
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A prize-winning book with an introduction and five chapters covering issues such as altruism, homelessness, homosexuality, Dr. Barnardo’s photographs, journalism, dirt, and the “new man.”
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McCalman, Ian. Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London 1795–1840. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
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Unsurpassed study of the shadowy radical press in London and its morphing into the pornographic book trade in the early part of the century. Original research into a hidden part of London’s underground culture in the first half of the 19th century.
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Rodger, Richard. “Slums and Suburbs: The Persistence of Residential Apartheid.” In English Urban Landscape. Edited by P. J. Waller, 233–268. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
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Good historical analysis of the persistence of residential segregation of different classes, with charts and illustrations from the early 19th century to the early 20th century. Covers urban congestion and concentration, residential segregation, and various kinds of developments such as the “semi-detached” house, the garden city, and the council estate.
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Wise, Sarah. The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum. New York: Vintage, 2009.
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Gives the history of a specific neighborhood, “The Nichol,” in the East End of London in the late 19th century. Also includes a history of Victorian slums and recovered individual stories of slum dwellers.
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Wohl, A. S. The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London. Studies in Urban History 5. London: Edward Arnold, 1977.
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An important and still-definitive examination of the housing reform movement and working-class housing issues, specifically in London. Uses archival and vestry reports. Illustrated.
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Women, Gender, and Sexuality

After the flurry of scholarship in urban history and in the wake of the feminist critical movement of the 1970s, a number of scholars turned to the investigation of the place of women in the urban space. Alexander 1983, on working women in London, was a bridge between urban history and a more gendered study. Parsons 2000 challenged the critical notion of the urban male flâneur or idle walker and observer of city life (first identified by Baudelaire) by analyzing women city walkers such as shoppers, workers, and social investigators, while Walkowitz 1992 added to the picture by articulating stories of prostitution and murder, as well as adventurous discussion of sex, which haunted the late-19th-century city. As the feminist critique morphed into studies of gender and queer studies, scholars again found their subject in the 19th-century city as evidenced in Delgado 2007, which links homosexuality to one of the most famous contemporary journalistic exposés of prostitution in London, and in the wide-ranging study of London and homosexuality in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods by Cook 2003.

Alexander, Sally. Women’s Work in 19th-Century London: A Study of the Years 1820–50. London: Journeyman Press, 1983.
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A classic of feminist history first published in 1976. Seven chapters. Investigates women’s employment in London from the 1820s to the1850s, including the social and economic structures within which it took place. Analyzes class formation and conflict, capital development, and changes in the organization of production. Treats slop work, skilled work, and casual work.
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Cook, Matt. London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture 39. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
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Wide-reaching cultural history analyzing the relationship of London and homosexuality during the years of increased anxiety about male–male relationships and at the same time the beginnings of a homosexual rights movement. Covers various scandals but also takes a detailed look at representations in the press and literature. Includes sections on the history of male–male relationships, the law, and The Portrait of Dorian Gray.
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Delgado, Anne. “Scandals in Sodom: The Victorian City’s Queer Streets.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 40.1 (Spring 2007): 21–34.
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A narrower but no less useful study of prostitution and homosexuality as treated in a series of newspaper articles by W. T. Stead in “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” (1885) and by John Saul’s novel Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881). Available online to subscribers.
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Langbauer, Laurie. “The City, the Everyday, and Boredom: The Case of Sherlock Holmes.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 5.3 (Fall 1993): 80–120.
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Deeply embedded in cultural theory and with a feminist lens, reexamines the idea that the city induces boredom. Focusing on Sherlock Holmes, the essay makes an intricate argument: it is not the monotony of commodity capitalism that induces boredom, as theoretically proposed by the cultural critics, but the affect of boredom is caused by women.
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Parsons, Deborah. Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
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An important study that introduces women into the study of urban street life. Treats the prostitute as a sign of the uncontrollable, but concentrates on middle-class women walking the streets to work, to shop, and to serve others, who create in their writing a different representation of the city.
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Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London. Women in Culture and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
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Impressive cultural study focusing on three historical events (Stead’s “Maiden Tribute” articles, a “Men and Women’s Club,” and the Jack the Ripper case) to elucidate a formative moment in feminist politics and popular narratives of sexual danger, a period when the imaginary boundaries of London were transgressed.
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19th-Century Writers and the City

The great Victorian cities of London and Manchester were the setting and arguably the inspiration for many of the major novels of the century. The Regency novel by Pierce Egan, Life in London (1821), was popular throughout the century and influenced later efforts to represent the variety and contrasts of urban life, such as G. W. M. Reynolds’s massive The Mysteries of London and The Mysteries of the Court of London (1846–1856). Elizabeth Gaskell set two of her novels in Manchester (Mary Barton and North and South, 1848 and 1855, respectively). Most of Charles Dickens’s novels were set in London, but it was Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories who created the idea of a foggy, dangerous late-century London. George Gissing surveyed the working lives of minor writers and journalists in London in New Grub Street (1891) and also those of women who needed to work in The Odd Women (1893). Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896) chronicled life in the slums of London. Poets also were affected by the city, with perhaps the most famous poem being James Thomson’s “The City of Dreadful Night” (1874), though many other poets from Wordsworth to Elizabeth Barrett Browning located poems in urban settings. There were also many journalistic sketch writers who detailed scenes of city life, including George Augustus Sala and Dickens.

Social Observation and Criticism

Much of the work by journalists, novelists, and, sometimes, poets on the city was critical of its overcrowding, dirt, crime, and other negative features, but some commentators tried to give a sense of the range of life and sights available in the city, frequently in a humorous way, as did Dickens in Sketches by Boz. One of the first of the critics was Frederick Engels, whose 1845 study of Manchester has never been out of print (Engels 1971). Henry Mayew did a survey of London’s skilled and unskilled workers for the Morning Chronicle in 1849–1850 and later of the many people who plied their trades on the London streets (Humpherys 1977). Charles Booth did a mammoth survey of poverty in London in 1889 (see Booth 1969). The website Victorian London has full-text links to a number of London sketch writers.

Booth, Charles. Charles Booth’s London: A Portrait of the Poor at the Turn of the Century, Drawn from His “Life and Labour of the People in London.” Edited by Albert Fried and Richard Ellman. London: Hutchinson, 1969.
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Representative selections from Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London. Two volumes (1889) including the conditions and work of the poor. Commentary, maps; introduction by Raymond Williams.
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Engels, Frederic. The Condition of the English Working Classes in 1844. 2d ed. Translated and edited by W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner. Oxford: Blackwell, 1971.
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First published in 1845 in Germany. First translated by Florence K. Wischnewetzky in 1892, with a new preface by Engels. The classic work on working-class lives in industrial cities. Begins with survey of London, then a few industrial towns, and then Manchester, the main subject. Has never been out of print.
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Humpherys, Anne. Travels in the Poor Man’s Country: The Work of Henry Mayhew. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1977.
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The only book-length study of Mayhew’s articles on “Labour and the Poor” for the Morning Chronicle (1848–1850) and his four-volume London Labour and the London Poor (1862), which is an important source of information about the lives and work of the working poor and the street sellers.
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Victorian London.
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Has full-text links for several Victorian London sketch writers, including Thomas Beames, The Rookeries of London (1852), and James Grant, The Great Metropolis (1833).
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Literary and Artistic Responses to the City

Literary scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries have been interested in the response of writers and artists to the Victorian city since the beginning of the revival of interest in the period. There are many chapters and articles that look at individual writers or artists and their response to the city. Surprisingly, one of these treats Frederick Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in Manchester in 1845 as a literary text (Marcus 1974). Maxwell 1977 compares the visions of the popular novelists G. W. M. Reynolds and Dickens in their use of a trope of “mysteries.” William Sharpe has been particularly interested in James Thomson’s long poem, “The City of Dreadful Night” (Sharpe 1984), but has also compared poems on the city by Matthew Arnold, Arthur Clough, and Baudelaire (Sharpe 1985–1986). Thesing 1982, in an early and thus somewhat outdated survey, looks at a wide variety of poets’ responses. Such broad surveys, including also Hulin and Coustillas 1979, continue to be published based on standard tropes of the city (Tinkler-Villani 2005), but more recently there have been efforts to include more-theoretical bases for literary analysis (Freeman 2007).

Freeman, Nicholas. Conceiving the City: London. Literature and Art 1870–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
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Provides a new look at attempts by a number of late-Victorian novelists, poets, painters, and theoreticians to represent London. Three general divisions—“Empiricist/Realist,” “Impressionistic,” and “Symbolist”—include insightful discussions of Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Henry James, J. R. Whistler, and Edgar Monet, as well as several other writers and painters who anticipated high modernism. Establishes late Victorian London as a place of experimentation.
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Hulin, Jean-Paul, and Pierre Coustillas, eds. Victorian Writers and the City. Villeneuve-d’Ascq, France: Publications de l’Université de Lille III, 1979.
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Though somewhat out of date, eight useful essays on English writers on the city: Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, Frederic Harrison, George Gissing, Arthur Morrison, and Rudyard Kipling.
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Marcus, Steven. Engels, Manchester and the Working Class. New York: Random House, 1974.
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Not a historical study but a discussion of Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in 1844 as a literary text and Engels as a literary author. Compares the work to other descriptions of Manchester by Dickens, Carlyle, Gaskell, Balzac, Tocqueville, and others.
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Maxwell, Richard. “G. W. M. Reynolds, Dickens and the Mysteries of London.” 19th Century Fiction 32 (1977): 188–213.
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A discussion of the urban mystery novels of Reynolds and Dickens and their predecessors and influences. An analysis of the use of the mysteries to suggest the contradictory movement of Victorian society. Argues that the mystery novel is a genre in which the Gothic becomes the vehicle of social commentary. Lengthy discussion of Bleak House.
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Sharpe, William. “Learning to Read The City.” Victorian Poetry 22.1 (Spring 1984): 65–84.
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A detailed reading of James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night, which argues that the poem contains a Stoic response to the fragmentation of the modern city and an attempt by the author to modify the reader’s response to the city.
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Sharpe, William. “Confronting the Unpoetical City: Arnold, Clough, and Baudelaire.” Arnoldian 13.1 (Winter 1985–1986): 10–22.
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A comparison, with some close readings, of Arnold’s rejection of the city as not representable in poetry versus Baudelaire’s acceptance, even joy, in the impact of the city on poetry. Discusses Clough, who in theory was close to Baudelaire’s position but in the practice of his poetry was closer to Arnold’s sense of the modern city as devoid of religion.
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Thesing, William. The London Muse: Victorian Poetic Responses to the City. South Atlantic Modern Language Association Award Study. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1982.
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A general survey of poetic responses to London, best in its readings of individual poems. Organized into four chapters: “Romantic Versions of the City,” “Realism versus Escapism, 1850–1870,” “The Urban Volcano, 1870–1890,” and “The Poetry of the Nineties,” most known and a number of less well-known poets are included.
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Tinkler-Villani, Valeria, ed. Babylon or New Jerusalem? Perceptions of the City in Literature. DQR Studies in Literature 32. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005.
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Based on the conventional binary of responses to the city, the collection contains eight out of twenty essays on 19th-century writers’ responses to the city. Includes essays on Wordsworth, Blake, Dickens, Mayew, Booth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, James Thomson, Arthur Symons, Eugène Sue, and G. W. M. Reynolds.
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The Industrial Cities

Victorian writers and readers as well as 20th- and 21st-century scholars and critics were drawn to London as a subject. But one of the major contributions of the urban history movement in the 1960s and 1970s was to bring about a greater understanding of the other major industrial cities, which developed mainly in the north. Checkland 1964 used Glasgow as a model for the development of the industrial city. Other early studies focused on a number of different industrial cities, a classic being Hobsbawm and Wrigley 1999, first published by Hobsbawm in 1968. Morris 2000 is a good historical survey of the development of the industrial city. Later investigations viewed the industrial cities as examples of changes in the organization of space: Dennis 1984 integrated historical and geographical models, while Hunt 2004 traced the movement from urban to suburban space throughout the century. A recent critical movement has turned away from the study of the working class in these cities to focus on the middle class (Gunn 2001).

Checkland, S. “The British Industrial City as History: The Glasgow Case.” Urban Studies 1.1 (May 1964): 34–54.
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One of the early foundational discussions of urban history. Asserts the importance of urban history and details the methods of researching such history. Provides an exemplary case study of all aspects of one of the important industrial cities of Britain in the 19th century. Available online to subscribers.
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Dennis, R. English Industrial Cities of the 19th Century: A Social Geography. Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography 4. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511560507Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A scholarly study that seeks to integrate historical and geographical work on issues such as transport and spatial structures.
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Gunn, Simon. The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority and the English Industrial City, 1840–1914. Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001.
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A good book on a barely researched subject. Looks at the construction of high culture in the industrial cities of Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester. Discusses the relationship between culture and power, with an overview of the public culture of “respectability.”
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Hobsbawm, Eric, and Chris Wrigley. Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day. Rev. ed. New York: New Press, 1999.
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An economic history of Britain from 1790 to the second half of the 20th century, with a leftist political perspective. Clear narrative of how the Industrial Revolution arose in Britain and how it affected the social and political development over some two hundred years. Discussion of the city in general and Bradford, Glasgow, Liverpool, London, and Manchester more specifically. First published in 1968.
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Hunt, Tristram. Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2004.
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Traces the rise of industrial cities through to the rise of suburbia. Focuses on literary representations, buildings, and civic pride. Three parts: “Confronting the City,” “Transforming the City,” and “Fleeing the City.”
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Morris, R. J. “The Industrial Town.” In The English Urban Landscape. Edited by P. Waller, 175–208. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
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A well-illustrated discussion of the rise of the industrial town and its decline in the 20th century. Includes a major section on the Potteries, and others on population and life histories, housing, space, cultural authority and place, time, and the road to the postindustrial town.
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Individual Industrial Cities

Much of the scholarly interest in the industrial cities has focused on Manchester, which came to be the preeminent example to both Victorian and later scholars. One of the earliest publications is Chadwick’s comparison of Manchester in 1850 and 1891 (Chadwick 1973). Messinger 1985 gives a general overview of the development of Manchester. Other works on Manchester cover more-specific aspects: the literary scene (Vicinus 1973), the food supply (Scola 1992), and youth gangs (Davies 1998). An inclusive collection covers many aspects of Manchester as well as providing an extensive bibliography (Kidd and Roberts 1985). There are, however, some studies of other industrial cities. The website Birmingham: Contrasts in a Victorian City offers a good survey of Victorian Birmingham, and a collection of essays honoring a major scholar of Bradford treats a wide variety of topics on that city (Wright and Jowitt 1982).

Birmingham: Contrasts in a Victorian City.
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An official website with links to discussions and images in photographs: “Scenes in Slumland,” “Timeline: The Malin Family,” “Industry,; “Alcohol Problems,” “Population,” “Joseph Chamberlain,” and “Education.”
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Chadwick, G. F. “The Face of the Industrial City: Two Looks at Manchester.” In The Victorian City: Images and Realities. Vol. 1. Edited by H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, 247–256. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.
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The development of Manchester, first in 1850 and then in 1891, by one of the founders of the urban history movement.
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Davies, Andrew. “Youth Gangs, Masculinity and Violence in Late Victorian Manchester and Salford.” Journal of Social History 32.2 (Winter 1998): 349–369.
DOI: 10.1353/jsh/32.2.349Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A detailed study of “scuttling” or gang confrontations in 1870–1900, based on 250 gang-related crimes reported in Manchester and Salford newspapers. Argues that the confrontations were linked to working-class notions of masculine “hardness” and its connection to ideas of honor and reputation. Also argues that “scuttlers” were not rebels but conservative in their adherence to these working-class masculine constructions. Available online to subscribers.
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Kidd, Alan J., and K. W. Roberts, eds. City, Class and Culture: Studies of Social Policy and Cultural Production in Victorian Manchester. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1985.
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Nine articles on different aspects of Victorian Manchester: class, police, charity, anti-Semitism, philanthropy, art, poetry, the periodical press, and fiction. Includes T. J. Wyke’s preliminary bibliography of 1,200 items.
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Messinger, Gary S. Manchester in the Victorian Age: The Halfknown City. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1985.
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A prize-winning history of the development of Manchester in the 19th century. Contains chapters on the first industrial city, the cotton industry and its world, and the creation of public order.
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Scola, Roger. Feeding the Victorian City: Food Supply of Manchester, 1770–1870. Edited by Alan Armstrong and Pauline Scola. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1992.
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Details from government reports and personal records about the provisioning of the city in an economic history context. One conclusion is that free enterprise responds to demand, not needs. Extensive introductory chapters on Victorian Manchester and Salford, and then individual chapters on meat, dairy products, vegetables and fruits, fish, market provisions, fresh food, distribution, markets, shops, and itinerant traders. Illustrations, maps, statistics.
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Vicinus, Martha. “Literary Voices of an Industrial Town: Manchester, 1819–70.” In The Victorian City: Images and Realities. Vol. 2, Shapes on the Ground and a Change of Accent. Edited by H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, 739–762. London: Routledge, 1973.
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Discusses efforts to represent the experience of the industrialized inhabitants in the poetry of Samuel Bamford, John Bolton Rogerson, Charles Swain, and John Critchley Prince, and in the novels and prose of Elizabeth Gaskell. Also a discussion of dialect poetry, Ben Brierly’s Journal.
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Wright, D. G., and J. A. Jowitt, eds. Victorian Bradford: Essays in Honour of Jack Reynolds. Bradford, UK: City of Bradford Metropolitan Council, 1982.
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Results of research by many of Jack Reynolds’s colleagues and students. Subjects of twelve chapters cover all areas of the city, including but not limited to trade, religion, poverty, social structure, public health, poor law, leisure, and a review of recent writing on the history of the town. Excellent bibliographies and overview of historical writing on Victorian Bradford.
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London

At the beginning of the 19th century, London was a collection of neighborhoods that had their own governments, welfare systems, refuse removal, street cleaning and paving, lighting, and policing. At the end of the century, it was an institutionally unified city, a process traced in Owen 1982. It was also the biggest city in the world, a product of rapid, uncontrolled growth and change, as detailed pictorially and textually in Fox 1992. It increased in population from around 1 million inhabitants at the end of the 18th century to over 4.5 million toward the end of the century. The diameter of its boundaries grew from less than four to more than six miles. The most important transformative building occurred due to the rapid expansion of the railway. New major roads and bridges were also constructed. Many important public buildings went up during the century, such as the Houses of Parliament and the Victoria and Albert Museum. There was also significant building of public works, a new sewer system, and the first underground railway in the world. There was a continual housing boom as improved public transportation enabled the middle classes to move from the crowded center to suburban areas, and the Cheap Trains Act brought in a workingman’s fare. Halliday 2003 details the life and works of eight of the major builders responsible for these changes. London was not an industrial center but was the most important city in the 19th century in terms of trade, commerce, and finance, emblemized by the great East End docks built during the century, making the tidal Thames River “the silent highway.” The streets of London were another great commercial highway, where some 40,000 men, women, and children made a living. The resulting crowding, variety, and change made London seem, paradoxically, both dangerous and exhilarating. London also generated much of the century’s literature and a good deal of its art. There have been a good number of surveys of this development of 19th-century London. Sheppard 1971 provides a social history, while Picard 2005 offers a more recent excellent history. One of the recent histories (White 2008) gives specific information about the life lived in Victorian London. Two reference works provide alphabetized entries for all aspects of Victorian London: Hibbert, et al. 2010 is the most authoritative, but Dictionary of Victorian London has links to many documents.

Dictionary of Victorian London.
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Created by Lee Jackson. Some 1,000 pages of Victoriana listed alphabetically. Diaries, journalism, newspaper articles, contemporary illustrations. Free access.
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Fox, Celina, ed. London: World City, 1800–1840. London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.
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The catalogue for an exhibition sponsored by the Kulturstiftung Ruhur in Essen, Germany, and the Museum of London. Exhaustive overview of London’s material culture in the first half of the century. Fourteen essays covering a wide range of topics plus a catalogue of the extensive exhibition.
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Halliday, Stephen. The Making of the Metropolis: Creators of Victoria’s London. Derby, UK: Breedon Books, 2003.
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Eight builders of sewers, houses, underground structures, and other structures: John Nash, Marc Brunel, Thomas Cubbitt, Sir Charles Barry, Sir Joseph Paxton, and Alfred Waterhouse. Illustrated.
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Hibbert, Christopher, Ben Weinreb, Julia Keay, and John Keay. The London Encyclopaedia. 3d rev. ed. London: Macmillan Reference, 2010.
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Essential and authoritative reference work with more than 5,000 references and two full indexes (one general and one for the 10,000 people mentioned). Five hundred illustrations.
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Owen, David. The Government of Victorian London: 1855–1889. Edited by Roy MacLeod. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
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Contains a general introduction to Victorian London plus thirteen chapters on metropolitan government, including the Metropolitan Board of Works, the Vestries, and the City Corporation.
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Picard, Liza. Victorian London: The Life of a City 1840–1870. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2005.
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Sociohistorical approach. A good introduction despite its early cut-off date. Twenty-three chapters on “Smells,” “the River,” “the Streets,” “the Railways,” “Buildings,” “Practicalities,” “Destitution and Poverty,” “the Working Class,” “the Middle Class,” “the Upper Class and Royality,” “Domestic Service,” “Houses and Gardens,” “Food,” “Clothes and so on,” “Health,” “Amusements,” “the Great Exhibition,” “the Crystal Palace at Sydenham,” “Education,” “Women,” “Crimes and Punishments,” “Religion,” and “Death.”
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Sheppard, Francis. London 1808–70: The Infernal Wen. History of London 7. London: Secker and Warburg, 1971.
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Social history that emphasizes the importance of industrialization and railways.
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White, Jerry. London in the 19th Century: “A Human Awful Wonder of God.” London: Vintage, 2008.
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Well-received and detailed study of the development, structure, and life of Victorian London.
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Cleaning Up London

One of the great achievements of the Victorian period was the creation, designing, and building of major structures to assure clean streets, a less polluted River Thames, and better ways to get rid of waste. Allen 2008 focuses on the efforts toward sanitary reform and the resistance to it, while Halliday 1999 details the specific efforts of the figure most identified with the efforts to cleanse London through improved sewers and the banking of the Thames.

Allen, Michelle. Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008.
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Traces reform and resistance to reform of sanitary conditions. Contains introduction and five chapters on the sewers, the Thames, Our Mutual Friend, reform in the 1880s, and George Gissing’s The Nether World. A twelve-page bibliography.
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Halliday, Stephen. The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Capital. Thrupp, UK: Sutton, 1999.
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An important study of one of the major builders during the period and his work on creating the sewers and the embankment of the Thames. Also includes discussion of thoroughfares, housing, and open spaces.
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Entertainment and the Streets

The streets of London were exciting, could be dangerous, and were the source for much of the life of Victorian London, as Allen 1998 demonstrates and as Stein 1995 analyzes in literary terms. People worked on the streets, entertained on them, lived on them. They also were the source of much literature and journalistic writing. Victorian London Streetlife (first published 1877) collected photographs of many of these street folk. At night, lit by light diffused through gas and fog, the streets became the cover for adventure, crime, and secret lives. Winter 1993 gives a portrait of this more dangerous side of the streets.

Allen, Rick. The Moving Pageant: A Literary Sourcebook on London Street-Life, 1700–1914. London: Routledge, 1998.
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Collection of ninety pieces by 19th-century writers, organized into four sections: “Amusements Serious and Comical,” “A Mask of Maniacs,” “The Attraction of Repulsion,” and “In Darkest England and Some Ways Out.” Also twenty contemporary illustrations.
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Stein, Richard J. “Street Figures: Victorian Urban Iconography.” In Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination. Edited by Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan, 233–263. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
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The city as both familiar and unknowable. Understanding the streets as a language enables mobility and security. Considers London monuments, mapping, and Dickens’s novels.
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Thomson, John, and Adolphe Smith. Victorian London Streetlife in Historical Photographs.
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Thirty-seven photographs of flower women, laborers, dustmen, street musicians, shoe blacks, and others. Originally published in 1877.
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Winter, James. London’s Teeming Streets, 1830–1914. London: Routledge, 1993.
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Social history with topical chapter headings including “Policing,” “Working,” “Rescuing,” “Enjoying,” “Breathing,” and “Cleaning.”
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Literature and Culture

The early studies of 19th-century urbanization were generally by urban historians. But soon, literary scholars became interested in the impact of industrialization and urbanization on culture in general and literature in particular. One of the earliest was Altick 1978, an impressive study by a major scholar of nonprint popular culture in London. Continuing the interest in popular culture, Humpherys 1991 focused on the most popular novel of the century, The Mysteries of London. Other studies attempted a more general approach to the investigation of the impact of the city on the literary and artistic imagination: Wolfreys 1998, incorporating recent literary theory, revealed the contradictory responses of artists to the city, while in an impressive survey the visual impact of the changes in London in the second half of the century was articulated (Nead 2000). Robinson 2004 followed this attention to the visual by analyzing both literary and visual productions in creating the “imaginary” of London. A collection of edited essays in Phillips 2007 gained scope through a focus on a few topics and the place of London in the work of specific writers. Following on the increased attention to the impact of empire on the homeland, McLaughlin 2000 demonstrated this impact on the homeland as represented by London through analysis of both sociological and literary texts.

Altick, Richard. The Shows of London: A Panoramic History of Exhibitions, 1600–1862. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1978.
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An important recovery of urban, nonprint popular culture. Examines exhibits of all sorts that culminated in the 1851 Crystal Palace. Includes information on 19th-century science museums, public art galleries, panoramas, wax works, and more.
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Humpherys, Anne. “Generic Strands and Urban Twists: The Victorian Mysteries Novel.” Victorian Studies 34.4 (Summer 1991): 455–472.
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A study of the urban mysteries novel as represented in France by Eugène Sue and in England by G. W. M. Reynolds and Charles Dickens. Available online to subscribers.
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McLaughlin, Joseph. Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000.
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A good study of the impact of the empire on the understanding and representation of the metropolis in the Sherlock Holmes stories, Charles Booth’s sociological investigations, Jack London’s ethnographical work, Conrad’s The Secret Agent, and T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland.
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Nead, Lynda. Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in 19th-Century London. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
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An impressive study of London in the second half of the 19th century, when it underwent large physical changes. Richly illustrated. Argues that the modern metropolitan experience, beginning in the 1860s, was visual. Divided into three sections: “Mapping and Movement,” “Gas and Light,” and “Streets and Obscenity.”
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Newey, Katherine. “Attic Windows and Street Scenes: Victorian Images of the City on the Stage.” Victorian Literature and Culture 25.2 (1997): 253–262.
DOI: 10.1017/S1060150300004770Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Discusses treatment of the city in popular drama, especially those by popular dramatist Thomas Moncrieff, author of Tom and Jerry in London, The Heart of London, and “The Scamps of London.” Available online to subscribers.
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Phillips, Lawrence, ed. A Mighty Mass of Brick and Smoke: Victorian and Edwardian Representations of London. DQR Studies in Literature 41. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007.
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Explores the place of London in the 19th- and early-20th-century artistic imagination. An introduction and twelve essays by different authors on suicide, Dickens, vagabonds, Wordsworth, James Thomson, George R. Sims, George Gissing, The Beetle, The Wings of the Dove, Jack London, Thomas Burke, and cemeteries.
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Robinson, Alan. Imagining London 1770–1900. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2004.
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Unusual interdisciplinary study. Analyzes both literature and painting to demonstrate two “Londons”—the material world and an “imaginary” London constructed by images and representational texts. William Blake, Dickens, “modern life” painting, the novels of Anthony Trollope (seldom thought of as a London writer), and the fiction of Henry James—a culmination of the aesthetic and representational issues of both painters and writers.
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Wolfreys, Julian. Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens. London: Macmillan, 1998.
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Informed by recent literary theory, demonstrates how the great variety of discourse, genre, and architecture or topography in the city influenced writers in the first sixty years of the century to create a kind of “citephobia” as well as a contradictory celebration of ineffability and possibility.
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Dickens

The greatest writer on Victorian urban life is Charles Dickens, whether writing as a novelist, sketch writer, or journalist. In fact, Dickens can be considered the source of later generations’ sense of Victorian London. All but one of his novels have substantial parts of the action in London (for example, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend), and one is set wholly in the city (Dombey and Son). Only Hard Times, set in a fictitious industrial city in the north, does not have a scene in London, though it has a London dandy who plays a role in the story. Nearly all of Dickens’s journalistic pieces also involve London places, people, and activities, particularly his first work, Sketches by Boz. One of the most important early essays on Dickens focused on the urban scene in Nicholas Nickleby (van Ghent 1961), but early in the revival of interest in urban history, Dickens’s London featured in critical studies: Welsh 1971 was one of the earliest to argue for the city in Dickens as both a material and metaphoric space, while Schwarzbach 1979 insisted on the importance of art to understanding the impact of the city. One of the major scholars on Dickens provided an overview of the urban in the work of Dickens (Collins 1987). A useful study of Dickens on the role of popular culture in general and London culture in particular appeared in Schlicke 1988; its author went on to edit one of the most useful companions to Dickens, with a number of sections on London, its monuments, and its streets (Schlicke 1999). Another companion to Dickens provides a good introduction to Dickens and London (Baumgarten 2001). One of the more recent books looks at the broadly religious views in Dickens and focuses on London (Smith 2008).

Baumgarten, Murray. “Fictions of the City.” In The Cambridge Companion to Dickens. Edited by John O. Jordan, 106–119. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL0521660165Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Good introduction to Dickens’s preoccupation with London. Discusses the magical and theatrical qualities of the city, Dickens as a walker, and his representations of it as a place of contradictions. Chapter available online to subscribers.
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Collins, Philip. “Dickens and the City.” In Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art, and Literature. Edited by William Sharpe and Leonard Walloch, 101–121. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1987.
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One of the major mid-20th-century Dickens scholars traces Dickens’s movement in person and in his fiction through the urban environment. Includes discussion of Dickens and Manchester as well as Paris. Reprint of paper first delivered in 1983 at the Proceedings of the Heyman Center for the Humanities, at Columbia University.
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Schlicke, Paul. Dickens and Popular Entertainment. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988.
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The first extended study of the role of popular entertainment in Dickens’s life and work. Illustrated. Chapters on the role of popular entertainment in Dickens’s childhood in Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Hard Times, and in his journalism and public readings.
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Schlicke, Paul, ed. Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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One of the best companions to Dickens’s work. Has extensive entries on London as well as “the street,” and many monuments. An indispensable reference work.
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Schwarzbach, F. S. Dickens and the City. London: Athlone Press, 1979.
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An early study of the impact of urbanization on Dickens’s life and work. Chapters organized by novel, representing a theme. The thesis of a Dickensian myth of the fall in the move from Kent to London is dated, but the analyses of the novels can still be useful.
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Smith, Karl Ashley. Dickens and the Unreal City: Searching for Spiritual Significance in 19th-Century London. Houndsmill, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
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Argues that London, while existing as a realist place in the plots of Dickens novels, becomes a symbolic means for exploring broadly religious views. Chapters focus on various aspects of the city: dirt, detectives, railway, the Thames, and the crowd.
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van Ghent, Dorothy. “The Dickens World: The View from Todgers.” In The Dickens Critics. Edited by George H. Ford and Lauriat Lane, 213–232. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961.
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First published in 1950 (Sewanee Review 58:419–438), this classic essay on the role of London in Dickens’s imagination is often quoted and still relevant. It argues that Dickens gives life to objects and objectifies people.
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Welsh, Alexander. The City of Dickens. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
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One of the earliest to study the subject. Views Dickens’s city both as historical reality and a metaphor for values and purposes expressed by the English novel. Traces the Christian tradition of two cities, the city of destruction and the city of God. Thirteen chapters divided into three parts: “The Metropolis,” “The Earthly City,” and “The Bride from Heaven.”
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World Cities

Though London was seen by contemporaries as the great city of commerce, Paris was seen as a cultural Mecca, and through the course of the 19th century other European and American cities developed and grew in importance. One of the earliest studies of this world development was a statistical survey of the growth of cities at the end of the 19th century (Weber 1963). As part of the development of urban history after the wars, an early conference on the industrial city produced a volume of essays on twelve different cities (Thernstrom and Sennett 1969). In a major study that took decades, Hall 2009 analyzed the planning of fourteen European cities. Journalistic representations of aspects of city life were important throughout the century, and Lauster 2007 expands the discussion of the city sketch to include, in addition to England, France and Germany. The centrality of London and Paris to the sense of the city in the 19th century was featured in two critical studies in the 1990s: one demonstrated how allegory worked in the construction of London and Paris (Maxwell 1992), and in an original study of housing in London and Paris, Marcus 1999 demonstrated how the apartment house complicates the traditional views of the separation of spheres and spaces in the 19th century. In another recent comparative study, Cohen and Johnson 2005 focuses on the function of dirt in literary and cultural materials in London and Paris. More recently, a major study of John Ruskin and Venice made important additions to the understanding of the Victorian critic and also of the image of Venice (Hewison 2009).

Cohen, William A., and Ryan Johnson, eds. Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
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Focuses on the filth in literary and cultural materials from London, Paris, and their colonial outposts in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Topics include the building of sewers; the link between interior design and bourgeois sanitary phobias; the fictional representation of laboring women and foreigners as polluting; and relations among disease, disorder, and sexual-racial disharmony.
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Hall, Thomas. Planning Europe’s Capital Cities: Aspects of 19th-Century Urban Development. Planning, History and the Environment. London: Routledge, 2009.
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Detailed examination of the planning process of fourteen European capitals, mainly from 1850 to 1880: Paris, London, Helsinki, Athens, Christiania, Barcelona, Madrid, Copenhagen, Vienna, Berlin, Stockholm, Brussels, Budapest, and Rome. Covers all aspects of planning and gives place to the unsung authors of the plans. Originally published in Swedish. Published in German in 1986, but revised and updated for this first English edition. Automated translation.
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Hewison, Robert. Ruskin on Venice: “The Paradise of Cities.” New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
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Published by Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Traces Ruskin’s long relationship with Venice, which he saw as an ideal of civic society. Through his study of Venice, Ruskin discovered the neglected Gothic part of its heritage and helped create the modern image of the city. Draws on notebooks, drawings, and manuscripts. Generously illustrated.
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Lauster, Martina. Sketches of the 19th Century: European Journalism and Its Physiologies, 1830–50. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
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Useful discussion of the urban sketch as developed in the press across Europe during the early Victorian period. Argues that sketches transform models of visual and printed media into a kind of sociology. Includes discussion of England, France, Germany, and many authors, including Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, and Balzac.
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Marcus, Sharon. Apartment Stories: City and Home in 19th-Century Paris and London. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
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An original and innovative comparative cultural study that argues that the apartment house embodied the intersections of city and home, public and private, and masculine and feminine spheres and challenges conventional thought about the unproblematic divisions of public and private.
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Maxwell, Richard. The Mysteries of Paris and London. Victorian Literature and Culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992.
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Uses the form of allegory to demonstrate how the visual alone cannot encompass the city.
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Thernstrom, Stephan, and Richard Sennett, eds. 19th-Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History. Yale Studies of the City 1. London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969.
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Twelve papers from a Yale 1968 conference on the industrial city, eight of which are on American cities. Others cover Hamilton, Ontario; Carmaux, France; Bogota, Columbia; and London (Irish slums). Quantitative, each with a narrow focus. Topics: “Urban Class Mobility Patterns,” “Urban Residential Patterns,” “Urban Elite and Political Control,” and “Urban Families.” Also published as The Structure of 19th-Century Cities, edited by James H. Johnson and Colin Polley (London: Croom Helm, 1982).
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Weber, Adna Ferrin. The Growth of Cities in the 19th Century: A Study in Statistics. Cornell University Press Reprints in Urban Studies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963.
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Originally published in 1899, considered “a classic pioneer work.” A statistical analysis of population growth and its impact during the 19th century on cities in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. In nine chapters on a variety of subjects, including internal migration, physical and moral health, and the general effects of the concentrations of population in urban centers.
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VICTORIAN LITERATURE
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Barnes, William
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Braddon, Mary Elizabeth
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Browning, Robert
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Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism
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Class
Clough, Arthur Hugh
Collins, Wilkie
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Crime and Punishment
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Dickens, Charles
Disraeli, Benjamin
Domesticity
Dowson, Ernest
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Education
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Historical Novel, The
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Mill, John Stuart
Mobility
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Morris, William
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Newgate Novel, The
Newman, John Henry
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Pater, Walter Horatio
Periodical Press, The
Psychology
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Reade, Charles
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Reynolds, G. W. M.
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Unitarianism
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Ward, Mary
Webster, Julia Augusta
Wells, H. G.
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