This thesis examines the ways in which the literary depiction of the cityscape by several popular mid-Victorian novelists can be read alongside the context of their profound interest in theatre. Though many critics consider Charles Dickens to be the quintessential London novelist, I probe the extent to which other novelists of the era – Wilkie Collins, Augustus Mayhew, and Shirley Brooks – can be considered as 'London' writers. While a distinction can be made between the attributes of early and late nineteenth-century city writings, I suggest that the act of theatricalising the urban landscape can be considered as a mode which was typical of how midnineteenth-century novelists depicted the city. This study brings together two strands of criticism which, for the most part, have hitherto been treated separately. While numerous scholars have examined Dickens's depiction of London, an equal number have contextualised his writings alongside drama of the nineteenth century. A few critics have alluded to the theatricality of Dickens's depictions of the city, but this study offers the first full-length account of how this sense of theatricality is achieved in Our Mutual Friend (1865). I also examine this phenomenon in lesser-known writings of the period – Basil (1852), Paved With Gold (1858), and Aspen Court (1855). The first chapter will argue that the focal authors had a broad theatrical imagination, and how this impacts on their depiction of urban experience will be examined throughout this study. While their descriptions of London are attuned to the sense of visuality and aurality that can be associated with both the city and the theatre, a knowledge of drama, including gestural action, stock characters, and costumery, influences their conception of character. The final chapter will explore nineteenthcentury drama and these writers' depictions of the city through the lens of intertextuality, arguing that both are highly allusive.

No description available.

This thesis explores the social reception of the telephone mainly in late-Victorian and Edwardian London. My objective is to understand how urban populations are educated to a new technology, and how technology is socially appraised and embedded. "The social reception of technology" is defined as the development and promotion of a new technology, the political reactions and social comment it stimulates, and the nature of its social and geographic diffusion. This approach, I argue, reveals important connections between technology, ideology and social power in the city. The telephone was one of several new space-binding technologies introduced into Britain between 1870 and 1920. The telephone contributed to the creation of a "networked city", and to the extension of the "public sphere". Because of the telephone's basic characteristics -- its speed and immediacy of communication -- commentators have regarded it as essentially modern and democratic. This view is considered deterministic and an exaggeration of the telephone's early significance. The telephone system developed gradually. Initially an elite technology, the telephone was first used and introduced in traditional ways. Developed in Britain largely by private interests, the telephone was commoditised by its promoters and marketed as a business machine. The long distance network was prioritised over local networks, business over social uses, and the extension of the price system over other possible social objectives. As the telephone system developed, this "entrepreneurialism" clashed with other ideological agents in the city: the individualism of private land ownership, professionalism of engineers and public servants, and with diverse state and non-state institutions claiming to represent the public interest. If not modern in function or consequence, the telephone I suggest was institutionally modern; in the attempts of its promoters and their opponents to use the "public sphere" in their own interest, yet always subject to it; to generate through the press and through material and symbolic practices talk about the telephone, yet always subject to public scrutiny in the form of press comment and criticism. The thesis illustrates these arguments through a survey of how the telephone was reported in the press; through a study of policy as revealed in the archives of the Post Office and the National Telephone Company; and through a case study of the telephone's diffusion in the middle class suburb of Hampstead.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1969. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

Throughout history the concept of a "mall" has manifested itself in various forms. Malls provided once and continue to provide an opportunity for ostentation and observation in a constructed environment. Ranelagh Gardens is an example of such an environment. It is an Eighteenth Century London pleasure garden devoted exclusively to the acts of exhibiting one's self and beholding others, a sort of celebratory act of mutual affirmation. These gardens were frequented by various elements of London society, from royalty to the middle class. All sorts of boundaries were further blurred through the ritual of the masquerade, which flourished at Ranelagh. After examining the various devices employed to that end, I will look into the parallels of such interaction in our increasingly virtual society.

Thesis (doctoral)--University of London, 1970. / Includes bibliographical references (p. i-xxiii).

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Paris, 1913. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [717]-745) and index.

No description available.

This thesis is a study of the development of the London Society of Compositors from the formation of the Society in 1848 until the separation of news compositors from book compositors, for all negotiations concerning news compositors' wage rates and working conditions, following the Hampton Dispute of 1906. This study examines both the growth of the London Society of Compositors and the trends of change and continuity among metropolitan compositors during the second half of the nineteenth century, and it addresses itself to issues in trade union history, to contemporary concepts in the social history of Victorian society and also to aspects of the political press. Within the context of the metropolitan composing trade this study seeks firstly, to explain the presence in Victorian London of a trade union whose organization is archaic and whose level of craft control vis-a-vis employers is singular; secondly, it attempts to explain and to examine the persistence and the pervasive influence of compositors' craft ideology whose form and functions are fifteenth century in origin; thirdly, it considers the impact of the growth of the metropolitan printing industry upon the LSC; fourthly, it examines the union's response to political developments in British society in the second half of the nineteenth century; finally, this thesis throws light on the involvement of some metropolitan compositors in the radical and socialist press in Victorian London.