London in the Nineteenth Century

"If you live in London, have visited London or love London , you have to read this book. White borrows a quotation from William Blake, who characterised the place as a ‘human awful wonder of God’, and gives a gripping account of London’s exponential growth between 1815 and 1900. He looks not only at the city’s physical expansion but also its social and political development, and charts the progression from it being a relatively small city, in which the mob often held sway, to a comparatively modern metropolis controlled by democratic institutions. The London White describes was a city of groups at odds with one another – the rich and poor, the advantaged and the disadvantaged. White explains what it was like to be a Londoner in the 19th century, whether a prominent city elder, a young boy in a workhouse, a middle-class bureaucrat or one of the 100,000 scavengers. What fascinates me is the parallels that can be drawn between the London of the 19th century and 21st century Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, where I currently live and work."