"Loathsome London": Ruskin, Morris, and Henry Davey's History of English Music (1895)

Zon, B

Abstract

The dystopia of the Victorian city is ubiquitous as a trope of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, appearing across a wide array of literature in fiction, poetry, pamphlets, articles, reviews, socio-demographic works, socialist tracts, and miscellaneous papers. Anti-urbanism plays a prominent role in Dickens, Kingsley, and Gissing, to name but a few, and emerges in more pointedly sociological titles such as Andrew Mearns's The Bitter Cry of London (1883); Thomas Escott's England: Its Peoples, Polity, and Pursuits (1885); Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People of London (1889–1902); Ford Madox Ford's The Heart of the Empire (1905); and W. W. Hutching's London Town Past and Present (1909) (Lees, in Fraser and Sutcliffe, 1983: 154; Hulin and Coustillas, 1979: passim). Themes of urban degradation, overpopulation, squalor, unemployment, lack of education, despair, and pollution fill their pages.

Citation

Zon, B. (2009). "Loathsome London": Ruskin, Morris, and Henry Davey's History of English Music (1895). Victorian Literature and Culture, 37(2), 359-375. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150309090238

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2009
• Deposit Date: Sep 12, 2012
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 12, 2012
• Journal: Victorian Literature and Culture
• Print ISSN: 1060-1503
• Electronic ISSN: 1470-1553
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 37
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 359-375
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150309090238
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1523130