![]() ![]() Many returned home in the same lack of light, through dim, dangerous, and unpaved streets, after 12- or 14-hour days. By two or three in the morning, some had left home miles away, even in the countryside, to hike in to the markets and to set up stalls in near-blackness. Sellers shout, carts crash, horses neigh and cattle bellow, from what seems before dawn until midnight, daily.įlanders opens with a look at how early many had to wake up. These streets prove noisy, as horses clop and cabs rattle. Well illustrated with period lithographs and engravings, prefaced by helpful maps reminding us how much that capital does and does not match the layout of the ever-congested megapolis today, The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London keeps to the streets themselves rather than the interiors and domestic duty. This is thick, and therefore a congenial match for Dickens’ own sometimes voluble texts. While these do not align perfectly, as the queen reigned between 18 while Dickens died in 1870, the general fit proves neat enough here. Gleaning the most informative or entertaining evidence from the author’s many books, Judith Flanders combines Dickens’ life and works with archives as a “perfect optic through which to see the city’s transformation” during the reign of Queen Victoria and Dickens’ life span. It doubled in population between 18, and this growth spurt was witnessed by its most famous author, who moved there at the age of ten, in 1821. ![]()
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