PDF Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City by Tristram Hunt in Arts-Photography

Description

From Manchesters deadly cotton works to Londons literary salons; a brilliant exploration of how the Victorians created the modern citySince Charles Dickens first described Coketown in Hard Times; the nineteenth-century city; born of the industrial revolution; has been a byword for deprivation; pollution; and criminality. Yet; as historian Tristram Hunt argues in this powerful new history; the Coketowns of the 1800s were far more than a monstrous landscape of factories and tenements. By 1851; more than half of Britains population lived in cities; and even as these pioneers confronted a frightening new way of life; they produced an urban flowering that would influence the shape of cities for generations to come. Drawing on diaries; newspapers; and classic works of fiction; Hunt shows how the Victorians translated their energy and ambition into realizing 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 city-states of Renaissance Italy; the Victorians worked to turn even the smokestacks of Manchester and Birmingham into sites of freedom and art. And they succeeded—until twentieth-century decline transformed wealthy metropolises into dangerous inner cities. An original history of proud cities and confident citizens; Building Jerusalem depicts an unrivaled era that produced one of the great urban civilizations of Western history.