The Victorian City

May 12, 2014
Charles Dickens grimly portrayed Londoners as people resigned to hardscrabble living, ubiquitous filth, and prevalent violence, and Flanders (The Invention of Murder) successfully recreates the feel of London at Dickens’s peak as she delves deep into the rhythms and architecture of particular neighborhoods. This information-packed profile of Victorian London offers renewed insight into Dickens’s youth as an imprisoned debtor’s working child; his love of walking the city’s winding streets; and finally, the reality behind the traumatic adventures of such well-known characters as Oliver Twist. The book is divided into four comprehensive sections, covering topics like urban water and road transportation systems, affordable entertainment, and the wide range of linguistic dialects. Only the somewhat abrupt ending, after a segment on suicides, feels incomplete. While Dickens typically hewed close to reality in his work, Flanders’s expertise shines when exposing Dickens’s embellishments, particularly when his character Fagin faces execution rather than the less powerful but more realistic punishment of deportment. This well-researched sociological overview provides highly detailed context for cultural touchstones, while shattering the popular yet inauthentic image of a pristine Victorian age that never existed.

June 1, 2014
A well-stuffed compendium on the transformational era in the history of London that fed both Charles Dickens' imagination and his well of outrage.From his first published work, Sketches by Boz (1836), set in pre-Victorian London, until his last, unfinished novel, Edwin Drood (1870), Dickens drew on the life and characters of his beloved city. In her prodigiously detailed work, British journalist Flanders (The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Reveled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime, 2013, etc.) reminds readers that "Dickensian" changed in meaning from the early part of the author's career-when it meant "comic"-to a posthumous sense of "grim" and "dark." Indeed, Dickens, the tireless walker of the London streets, author of nimble imagination who composed several works at once, covered all of the city as the early Victorian era of "earnestness and endeavor" gave way to the "moving age" involving increased population, paralyzing traffic, industry, building and slums. Where to begin in such a work? On the street, of course, from just getting around, as most people did by foot, arriving for 12-hour-plus working shifts in a dusty mess and assaulted by a roar of noise; to taking horse-drawn omnibuses, hackney coaches, mail coaches, cabs and so on, all susceptible to natural hazards like fog. The greatest change to London was the arrival of the railroad in 1836, which sliced through old neighborhoods Dickens knew keenly, Moreover, the railways became for him "symbols of a time that was passing, or past." Flanders writes with bubbling enthusiasm about the old markets, Covent Garden and Smithfield, with their accompanying din and smells, and the plethora of life we only know through Dickens' eyes: the street vendors and artists, matchstick sellers, slum dwellers, prostitutes, habitues of gin palaces and prisoners.A terrific companion while reading Boz himself.

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February 1, 2014
Better than a fun fair. Celebrated for "The Invention of Murder", a story of Victorian fascination with ghastly crimes, Victorian-era expert Flanders gives us a detailed look at London as Dickens knew it, when it grew from a charming little town to a booming city of 6.5 million. Gin palaces and chop-houses, sewers and slums, markets and entertainment emporia--it's all here for the asking.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2014
By the end of the nineteenth century, London was the most populous city in world history and the center of an immense political and commercial empire that enveloped all populated continents. In his novels and essays, Charles Dickens vividly conveyed the color, dynamism, and squalor of the metropolis. Of course, Dickens had an ax to grind, so his efforts at social criticism led to some distortions. Also, he died in 1870, missing three decades of critical growth and reforms at the end of the Victorian era. Flanders, a Londoner, is a contributor to various British journals. She takes a broader and less judgmental approach than Dickens. Still, her imagery is often intense and striking even without editorial comment. Here is a putrid, disease-ridden water system filled with human and animal waste, characteristic of some of today's Third World urban centers. At Covent Garden, home to a huge food market and theaters, and also a center for vice, rich and poor mingled on a daily basis. The streets of London were a constant assault on the senses with their noise and smell. This is a superb portrait of an exciting, thriving, and dangerous city.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)