Everyday Life in ...: Everyday Life in Victorian London

- Blurb -

Everyday Life in Victorian London explores the daily lives of adults and children, aristocracy and middle classes, working poor and the ' submerged tenth' underclass. It shows the different faces of London, with its many extremes and contrasts - by day and by night; busy and peaceful; ugly and beautiful; safe and dangerous. It looks at the River Thames and its importance; the City, West and East Ends; at work, leisure, health, hospitals, education, food, clothes, housing, shops and markets, transport and infrastructure, public services, crime, the police and prisons, immigrant communities, and important events such as the Great Exhibition of 1851 and Queen Victoria' s golden and diamond jubilees. Daily life in the capital will be explored at three levels - above ground (views from hot air balloons), at ground level, and below ground (the sewage system, the underground railway and cemeteries). A central theme is the rapid growth in population throughout the century due to immigration from the countryside and abroad, and the resulting expansion into ' The Monster City' . The final chapter describes London at the end of the century with improved transport, a newly embanked Thames, a sewage system, housing for the poor, public buildings, hospitals and prisons - a transformed capital of a great empire and the embryo of the London we know today.