Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2009-07-20 14:36:15.104 / The thesis is an interdisciplinary history of the crowd in late-Victorian London. It examines the crowd using novels, newspapers, and periodicals, Home Office, Metropolitan Police, and Parliamentary records, and the personal papers of politicians and city officials. The thesis focuses on riots, demonstrations, and processions beginning in 1848 through to the Trafalgar Square mle in 1887 as well as the way novelists imagined the crowd at the fin de sicle. In the process, it re-evaluates the urban environment that gave rise to the crowd and it explores the crowds influence on space, geography, and movement.
The thesis rethinks crowd activity after mid century as the coming together of crowds and new concerns with modernity. It brings together the Marxist tradition of interpreting the crowd with writing on cultural and intellectual history as well as sociological and geographical theory in order to assess the crowds experience at street level. It aims to expand the traditional crowd model to include the spatial attitudes and practices that shaped the crowds relationship to the city and the citys relationship to the crowd. The thesis shows that the crowd, through its struggle for space, was not only a condition of the city, but one of the compelling features of urban modernity after mid century.
The thesis traces the crowd in London in six chapters. An introductory chapter first locates the crowd historiographically. Chapter two focuses on the extent to which Londons improvement project mobilized the crowd. Chapter three describes the crowds battle for private space, after huge swathes of the urban population were dis-housed, and the challenges this posed to spatial ordering. Chapter four examines the battle for public space in the form of the radical political crowds occupation and production of space, between 1848-1868, as well as the states heavy-handed response. Chapter five describes the culmination of earlier issues in Trafalgar Square in 1887. Finally, chapter six explores the way novelists imagined the crowd in late-Victorian slum fiction. / Ph.D
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OKQ.1974/1989 |
| Date | 20 July 2009 |
| Creators | McKean, Matthew |
| Contributors | Queen's University (Kingston, Ont.). Theses (Queen's University (Kingston, Ont.)), Harold Mah, History |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 20699848 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | This publication is made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws without written authority from the copyright owner. |
| Relation | Canadian theses |
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