The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London
Judith Flanders
ISBN: 9781250040213
An exhaustive overview of life for the poor and lower-middle classes in London.
This book has taken me AGES to finish, and it wasn't that it was uninteresting, it was that it was enormous. 424 pages of text, and another almost hundred more of notations, references, and indexing. Good grief.
She covers everything, in a mostly organized manner (I never did quite figure out what relation the vignettes at the beginnings of each section were meant to have in common with the section itself) and is honest about sources and conjectures and what we think we know and what we actually do know.
If anyone is planning to write about the City during this time-period, this is a worthy investment, and seems to be the sort where if you can't find the exact details of what you need here, you'll certainly find the research to lead you where you need to go.
I'm glad I read it, and I enjoyed it, but I'm glad to see the end of it - I feel like I've been slogging through the City myself, and am desperate for some fresh air and a change of scenery.
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