Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-century LondonIn this fascinating and innovative look at nineteenth-century London, Lynda Nead offers a new account of modernity and metropolitan life. She charts the relationship between London's formation into a modern organized city in the 1860s and the emergence of new types of production and consumption of visual culture. She considers the role visual images played in the creation of a vibrant and diverse urban culture and how new kinds of publics were created for these representations. Shifting the focus of the history of modernity from Paris to London, Nead here argues for a different understanding of gender and public space in a society where women joined the everyday life of city streets and entered the debates concerning morality, spectacle, and adventure. The book draws on texts and images of many kinds -- including acts of Parliament, literature, newspaper reports, private letters, maps, paintings, advertisements, posters, and banned obscene publications. Taking a highly interdisciplinary approach, Nead explores such intriguing topics as the efforts of urban improvers to move water, air, traffic, goods, and people in the Victorian metropolis; the impact of gas lighting and glass on urban leisure; and the obscenity legislation that emerged in response to new forms of visual mass culture that were perceived as dangerous and pervasive. |
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Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-century London Lynda Nead Limited preview - 2005 |
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aesthetic Arthur Boyd Houghton artists balloon building Campbell's centre Certeau Chelsea City of London city streets city's Corporation of London court created Cremorne Gardens crowd culture Daily Telegraph dancing platform dark described discourse display Dugdale Eliza Lynn Linton engraving experience flâneur forms gas companies gaslight gaslit gasworks George Augustus Sala Henry Mayhew Holborn Holywell Street houses illumination Illustrated London improvement John lamps leisure licences light London street Metropolitan Board Michel de Certeau mid-Victorian London modern city modern metropolis modernisation moral Museum of London night nineteenth century obscene publications Oxford Paris Penny Illustrated Paper period photographs picturesque Pleasure Gardens prints prostitution railway representation scene sewers sexual shops social Society spatial Strand streets of London Temple Bar Thames theatre thoroughfares tion trans uncanny University Press urban space Victorian Babylon Victorian London visual walk Watercolour Westminster Whistler woman women