Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In 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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Nead (Univ. of London) joins Roy Porter (London: A Social History, CH, Jun'95), Stephen Inwood (A History of London, CH, Mar'00), and Francis Sheppard (London: A History, CH, Jun'99) with her study of mid-Victorian London (1855-70). About half of London was rebuilt during that period. Nead uses the concepts of modernism and new social history to challenge interpretations, focusing on visual representations of urban space and specific cultural forms through which the modern city has meaning. She extends the history of modernity from government policies (new streets, street lighting, sewers, railways) to experiences of individuals (unchaperoned middle-class women in the streets, street etiquette, crowds, the gendering of space, the rise of "poisonous" obscene works). An art historian, she uses art, especially paintings, effectively in her three areas of concern: mapping and movement, gas and light, and streets and obscenity. Nead ends abruptly with the demise of Cremorne Pleasure Gardens (1877) and the removal of Temple Bar (1878). She marries traditional history with art history and presents a unique view of the modernization of London, some of which applies to London today. Highly recommended. W. J. Hoffman Jr.; emeritus, Hiram College