http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/1044014

Imagining London, 1770-1900

Combining a unique overview of metropolitan visual culture with detailed textual analysis, this interdisciplinary study offers an interpretation of how Londoners sought to make sense of the social transformations of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It argues that they lived in two cities simultaneously: the actual spaces of the metropolis, which can be analysed into a socially stratified and gendered topography; and an imaginary 'London', an 'Unreal City' which both reflected and shaped their understanding of the 'real' metropolis, and influenced their actions in that environment. Two interconnected themes run through its portrayal of London's modernising culture. The first is the role of money in London's free-market economy and the kinds of social relations which unregulated capitalism encouraged or produced. The second is gender relations in London's patriarchal society, tracing changes both in the actual situation of women and in the interdependent constructions of femininity and masculinity throughout this period. Including 40 in-text illustrations, Imagining London, 1770-1900 provides the reader with a unique understanding of how London was imagined textually and visually in the late-Georgian and Victorian period.

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