Building Jerusalem: The Rise & Fall of the Victorian City

New York. 2005. Metropolitan Books. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0805080260. 577 pages. hardcover. Jacket art - ‘The Rhinebeck Panorama of London,’ - The Bridgeman Art Library. Jacket design by Raquel Jaramillo. keywords: History Victorian Cities Urban Studies England. DESCRIPTION - From Manchester's deadly cotton works to London's literary salons, a brilliant exploration of how the Victorians created the modern city. Since Charles Dickens first described Coke-town in Hard Times, the Victorian city, born of the industrial revolution, has been a byword for deprivation, pollution, and criminality, depicted to this day as a monstrous landscape of factories, tenements, and disease. Yet, as historian Tristram Hunt argues in this powerful new history, the Coketowns of the 1800s were far more than uncontrolled industrial sprawl. By 1851, more than half of Britain's population lived in cities, and even as these urban pioneers confronted an often terrifying new way of life, they produced an incredible flowering that would influence the shape of cities around the world for generations to come. Drawing on private diaries, provincial newspapers, and classic works of fiction, Hunt documents the Victorians' great energy and aspirations and shows how their ambition translated into an astonishingly grand vision of the utopian city on a hill - the new Jerusalem. He surveys the great civic creations, from town halls to city squares, sidewalks, and even sewers, to reveal a story of middle-class power and prosperity and the liberating mission of city life. Vowing to emulate the great city-states of Renaissance Italy with an ethos of civic pride and spurred by municipal rivalry, the Victorians did their best to turn even the smokestacks of Manchester and Birmingham into sites of hard work, freedom, and they succeeded - until the twentieth when the loss of civic pride and the collapse of urban confidence transformed wealthy metropolises into dangerous inner cities. inventory #33147.