Author: Picard, Liza
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Year: 2005
ISBN: 0297847333
Binding: Hard Cover
Book Condition: As New
Jacket Condition: As New
Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall
Description: New book, 368 pages. To Londoners, the years 1840 to 1870 were years of dramatic change and achievement. As suburbs expanded and roads multiplied, London was ripped apart to build railway lines and stations and life-saving sewers. The Tames was contained by embankements, and traffic congestion was eased by the first underground railway in the world. A start was made on providing housing for the 'deserving poor'. There were significant advances in the field of medicine, and the Ragged Schools are perhaps the least known of Victorian achievements, in those last decades before universal state education. In 1851 the Great Exhibition managed to astonish almost everyone, attracting exhibitors and visitors from all over the world. Liza Picard shows us the reality of daily life. She takes us into schools and prisons, churches and cemeteries. This compassionate and wonderfully observant book recreates the splendour and misery, the inventiveness and energy, the vices and pleasures of that extraordinary age.