Victorian London, Liza Picard
Victorian London, Liza Picard
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Victorian London
The Life of a City 1840-1870

Author: Liza Picard

Narrator: Anton Lesser

Abridged: 6 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/10/2006

Synopsis

Like her previous books, this book is the product of the author's passionate interest in the realities of everyday life - and the conditions in which most people lived - so often left out of history books. This period of mid Victorian London covers a huge span: Victoria's wedding and the place of the royals in popular esteem; how the very poor lived, the underworld, prostitution, crime, prisons and transportation; the public utilities - Bazalgette on sewers and road design, Chadwick on pollution and sanitation; private charities - Peabody, Burdett Coutts - and workhouses; new terraced housing and transport, trains, omnibuses and the Underground; furniture and decor; families and the position of women; the prosperous middle classes and their new shops, e.g. Peter Jones, Harrods; entertaining and servants, food and drink; unlimited liability and bankruptcy; the rich, the marriage market, taxes and anti-semitism; the Empire, recruitment and press-gangs. The period begins with the closing of the Fleet and Marshalsea prisons and ends with the first (steam-operated) Underground trains and the first Gilbert & Sullivan.

Read by Anton Lesser

(p) 2005 Orion Publishing Group

About Liza Picard

Liza Picard was born in 1927. She is the bestselling author an acclaimed series of books on the history of London: ELIZABETH'S LONDON, RESTORATION LONDON, DR JOHNSON'S LONDON and VICTORIAN LONDON. Her most recent book, CHAUCER'S PEOPLE, explores the Middle Ages through the lives of the pilgrims in THE CANTERBURY TALES. She read law at the London School of Economics and was called to the Bar by Gray's Inn, but did not practise. She worked for many years in the office of the Solicitor of the Inland Revenue before retiring to become a full-time author. She lives in London.

About Anton Lesser

Anton Lesser has played many of the principal roles for the Royal Shakespeare Company including Petruchio, Romeo and Richard III. His film work includes Charlotte Grey, Eroica and The River Queen. He is active in radio and spoken word audio, with a range from Paradise Lost and Homer to Hamlet. He is particularly known for recording the novels of Charles Dickens, having won a Spoken Word Award for Great Expectations.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Marguerite on July 07, 2019

Liza Picard's 'London' histories are excellent, full of amazing research and recondite facts, nicely divided up into topics you can dip in and out of if you want, and very readable, and I'd highly recommend any of them as a sound first step into the city at a particular time period - a sort of jumpi......more

Goodreads review by DeAnna on July 05, 2016

Quite the tome, densely packed with facts in a lovely, dry, straightforward tome. I will probably find more of her stuff as I expand my historical nonfiction reading. My only complaint was that there wasn't more. Whenever I came across things that I'd read more on elsewhere, I found myself going, "Oh......more

Goodreads review by Allamaraine on January 15, 2022

Informative - I've read a few books about the victorian era and this was full of little bits I'd never read anywhere else. Dense, but easy to read. Most importantly - it was funny. Sometimes, history books where the author insists on inserting their own personality on every page can be irritating, h......more

Goodreads review by Andrea on February 25, 2010

Liza Picard opens up this book To Londoners, but I can safely add to history lovers, tourist and anyone fascinated with this Victorian era for the years of 1840-1870 there is simply a wealth of information about the social everyday life of Londoners. For all modern day Londoners living the life no n......more

Goodreads review by T. K. Elliott (Tiffany) on March 12, 2017

Liza Picard has achieved what many authors only dream of: to be informative, interesting, and witty. Simultaneously. Victorian London is split into chapters, each dealing with an aspect of London life, starting with Smells and ending with Death. Each chapter consists, essentially, of a long list of l......more

Quotes

I was delighted, as usual, by Liza Picard's Victorian London, the fourth of her grand series on life in the capital OBSERVER

This book is a feast of tit-bits, bringing 19th-century London to life piecemeal with the accumulation of facts ... a valuable addition to the literature of London SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Whether she is describing the music halls, such as the Alhambra in Leicester Square, or the criminal underworld, or the foundation of London University, or the lives of the costermongers, or the expansion of the middle-class suburbs, she never loses her eye for the telling detail. Reading her book is like gazing at one of those energetic, crowded canvases by the Victorian painter William Powel Frith, who brought the age to life through a multiplicity of detail EVENING STANDARD

The glories of Picard's magpie style are immediately apparent. She paints a picture with deft, sure strokes, then finds the perfect quotation TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

She cannot be denied her bid for the heavyweight crown. She writes the old history, descriptive and unanalytical, painted in exhilarating colours SUNDAY TIMES

She is an engaging companion, always wondering out loud about the sort of questions which you've asked yourself ... an enjoyable book SPECTATOR

This is a comprehensive history by anecdote, so the enlightening facts come thick and fast, from the suggestion that Queen Victoria had a slight German accent to the idea that linoleum is best washed with milk. And while there is certainly no pretence at some grand narrative, there is a genuine sense of time and place. It makes it a book to pick at - where else could one find out about velocipedes, costermongers and the "Monster School"? - but it's also one that adds incalculable depth to a walk round the capital. From houses to cemeteries, Picard enforces the idea that history really is all around us SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Picard enjoys recounting the gruesome daily mechanics of living in what Cobbett described as "the great wen" NEW STATESMAN

Thus the book proceeds, by typifying anecdotes, which are well chosen and impeccably annotated, and all linked together by Picard's untroubling, readable prose GUARDIAN

Liza Picard's Victorian London is a mine of information and very readable

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