The poor were, naturally, the most vulnerable to disease, and if this book tells us anything about Victorian London it is that poverty was its most shameful secret. The city’s crypts, according to Dickens, smelt of ‘rot and mildew and dead citizens’. Parliament itself began to choke and drove through legislation on a city-wide sewer project.īut proper sanitation came too late for those wiped out by cholera and other fevers. It was as nothing to the Great Stink of 1858, when the smell from the Thames riverbed, putrid and fermenting in temperatures of 33C (90F), became overpowering. No one who reads Judith Flanders's The Victorian City will view London in the same light again.The Streets, by Anthony Quinn, is published by Jonathan Cape and reviewed in New Fiction From the colourful cries of street-sellers to the uncomfortable reality of travel by omnibus, via the many uses for the body parts of dead horses or the unimaginably grueling working days of hawker children, no detail is too small, or too strange. 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 moment Charles Dickens, the century's best-loved novelist and London's greatest observer, arrived in the city in 1822, he obsessively walked its streets, recording its pleasures, curiosities and cruelties. Now, in The Victorian City, she explores London's outdoors in an extraordinary, revelatory portrait of everyday life on the streets. In The Victorian House, Judith Flanders described in intimate detail what went on inside the nineteenth-century home. In only a few decades, London grew from a Regency town to the biggest city the world had ever seen, with more than 6.5 million people and railways, street-lighting and new buildings at every turn. The nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented transformation, and nowhere was this more apparent than on the streets of London.

From the bestselling popular historian comes a masterly recreation of Victorian London, whose raucous streets and teeming denizens inspired and permeated the works of one of Britain's - and the world's - greatest novelists: Charles Dickens.

The Victorian City by Judith Flanders