Tristram Hunt
From Manchester's deadly cotton works to London's literary salons, a brilliant exploration of how the Victorians created the modern city, Since Charles Dickens first described Coketown in ,Hard Times,, the nineteenth-century city, born of the industrial revolution, has been a byword for deprivation, pollution, and criminality. Yet, as historian Tristram Hunt argues in this powerful new history, the Coketowns of the 1800s were far more than a monstrous landscape of factories and tenements. By 1851, more than half of Britain's population lived in cities, and even as these pioneers confronted a frightening new way of life, they produced an urban flowering that would influence the shape of cities for generations to come. , Drawing on diaries, newspapers, and classic works of fiction, Hunt shows how the Victorians translated their energy and ambition into realizing an astonishingly grand vision of the utopian city on a hill--the new Jerusalem. He surveys the great civic creations, from town halls to city squares, sidewalks, and even sewers, to reveal a story of middle-class power and prosperity and the liberating mission of city life. Vowing to emulate the city-states of Renaissance Italy, the Victorians worked to turn even the smokestacks of Manchester and Birmingham into sites of freedom and art. And they succeeded--until twentieth-century decline transformed wealthy metropolises into dangerous inner cities. , An original history of proud cities and confident citizens, ,Building Jerusalem, depicts an unrivaled era that produced one of the great urban civilizations of Western history. 
History,Nonfiction,Geography,Cities,Literature,19th Century,European Literature,British Literature
Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City