Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London - Softcover

Lynda Nead

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300107706 ISBN 13: 9780300107708

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2005

Synopsis

In this fascinating and innovative look at nineteenth-century London, Lynda Nead offers a new account of modernity and metropolitan life. She charts the relationship between London’s formation into a modern organized city in the 1860s and the emergence of new types of production and consumption of visual culture. She considers the role visual images played in the creation of a vibrant and diverse urban culture and how new kinds of publics were created for these representations. Shifting the focus of the history of modernity from Paris to London, Nead here argues for a different understanding of gender and public space in a society where women joined the everyday life of city streets and entered the debates concerning morality, spectacle, and adventure.
The book draws on texts and images of many kinds―including acts of Parliament, literature, newspaper reports, private letters, maps, paintings, advertisements, posters, and banned obscene publications. Taking a highly interdisciplinary approach, Nead explores such intriguing topics as the efforts of urban improvers to move water, air, traffic, goods, and people in the Victorian metropolis; the impact of gas lighting and glass on urban leisure; and the obscenity legislation that emerged in response to new forms of visual mass culture that were perceived as dangerous and pervasive.

About this title

About the Author:

Lynda Nead teaches history of art at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Review:

“[This] genuinely interdisciplinary study . . . makes a major contribution to our knowledge of the lived experience of the Victorian city.”—Timothy Barringer, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians


“Provocative and brilliant.”—Susan P. Casteras, Nineteenth Century Studies


“Splendid. . . . [Nead] brings an art historian’s fine sense of visual detail; indeed, one of the most striking features of the book is the wonderful illustrative material.”—John Marriott, History Today

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0300107706
• ISBN 13: 9780300107708
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264