Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City - Softcover

Tristram Hunt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 075381983X ISBN 13: 9780753819838

Publisher: Orion Paperbacks, 2005

Synopsis

This is a history of the ideas that shaped not only London, but Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield and other power-houses of 19th-century Britain. It charts the controversies and visions that fostered Britain's greatest civic renaissance. Tristram Hunt explores the horrors of the Victorian city, as seen by Dickens, Engels and Carlyle; the influence of the medieval Gothic ideal of faith, community and order espoused by Pugin and Ruskin; the pride in self-government, identified with the Saxons as opposed to the Normans; the identification with the city republics of the Italian renaissance ' commerce, trade and patronage; the change from the civic to the municipal, and greater powers over health, education and housing; and finally at the end of the century, the retreat from the urban to the rural ideal, led by William Morris and the garden-city movement of Ebenezer Howard.

About this title

About the Author

Professor Tristram Hunt is a lecturer in history at Queen Mary, University of London. Previously, he was an associate fellow at the Centre for History and Economics, King's College, Cambridge, and research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). Educated at Cambridge and Chicago Universities, he has worked as a government adviser. As well as authoring a number of BBC television programmes, he is a regular contributor to the Guardian, The Times and The Observer.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* London, Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, crucibles for the Industrial Revolution, horrified Blake with their "dark Satanic mills" and outraged Dickens with their scenes of Coketown squalor. But as a cultural historian, Hunt finds much more than pollution and poverty in the cities that made Victorian England the world's first truly urban society. He uncovers in these cities a remarkable range of municipal ambitions, as determined reformers fight to alleviate the misery of the crowded masses and as cosmopolitan artists stretch their talents for growing new audiences. Readers thus retrace the events that transform filthy streets into delightful thoroughfares connecting spacious and beautiful libraries, art galleries, churches, and civic halls. Hunt details the spirited debates over competing architectural styles--Greek, Gothic, Venetian--proposed for the new urban centers, locating these debates in a much larger clash of civic visions, progressive and reactionary. Personalities as well as principles collided in this struggle to define municipal life, the moralists Carlyle and Ruskin looming especially large. But it is a healthy ferment that Hunt sees in the conflicts over how best to establish social order in the burgeoning cities, the best and brightest Victorian minds joining to meet the shared challenge of creating a humane urban world. Because much of what the Victorian titans achieved toward that end has since been lost in the twentieth-century flight to suburbia, Hunt concludes by posing hard questions about how policymakers might now renew neglected ideals of municipal citizenship. An enlightening historical context for urgent current issues. Bryce Christensen
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Edition details

• Publisher: Orion Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 075381983X
• ISBN 13: 9780753819838
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 592