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

Hunt, Tristram

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080508259X ISBN 13: 9780805082593

Publisher: Picador, 2006

Synopsis

"Hunt tells this complex, epic story with dazzling clarity and organizational brilliance . . . I know nothing equaling its scope and ambition."--Phillip Lopate, Los Angeles Times
Ever since Charles Dickens first described Coketown in Hard Times, the nineteenth-century city has connoted deprivation, pollution, and criminality. Yet, as historian Tristram Hunt argues in this powerful new history, the Coketowns born of the Industrial Revolution were canvasas for ambitious urban innovators who would influence the shape of cities for generations.
Drawing on diaries, newspapers, and classic works of fiction, Hunt shows how the Victorians translated their energy and imagination into an astonishingly grand architecture, tranforming even the factories of Manchester and Birmingham into sites of freedom and art. Surveying the great civic creations, from town halls to city squares, sidewalks, and even sewers, Hunt reveals a story of middle-class power and the liberating mission of city life. The Victorians vowed to emulate the city-states of Renaissance Italy, and succeeded--until wealthy metropolises degenerated into dangerous inner cities in the twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author

Born in 1974, Tristram Hunt teaches modern British history at the University of London. He writes political and cultural commentary for the Los Angeles Times and Time magazine, and has authored numerous radio and television series for the BBC and Channel 4.

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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 080508259X
• ISBN 13: 9780805082593
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 608