The intriguing history of Dickens's London, showing how tourists have reimagined and reinvented the Dickensian metropolis for more than 150 years
Tourists have sought out the landmarks, streets, and alleys of Charles Dickens's London ever since the death of the world-renowned author. Late Victorians and Edwardians were obsessed with tracking down the locations-dubbed 'Dickensland'-that famously featured in his novels. But his fans were faced with a city that was undergoing rapid redevelopment, where literary shrines were far from sacred. Over the following century, sites connected with Dickens were demolished, relocated, and reimagined.
Lee Jackson traces the fascinating history of Dickensian tourism, exploring both real Victorian London and a fictional city shaped by fandom, tourism, and heritage entrepreneurs. Beginning with the late nineteenth century, Jackson investigates key sites of literary pilgrimage and their relationship with Dickens and his work, revealing hidden, reinvented, and even faked locations. From vanishing coaching inns to submerged riverside stairs, hidden burial grounds to apocryphal shops, Dickensland charts the curious history of an imaginary world.
The Victorians invented mass entertainment. As the nineteenth century's growing industrialized class acquired the funds and the free time to pursue leisure activities, their every whim was satisfied by entrepreneurs building new venues for popular amusement. Contrary to their reputation as dour, buttoned-up prudes, the Victorians reveled in these newly created 'palaces of pleasure'.
In this vivid, captivating book, Lee Jackson charts the rise of well-known institutions such as gin palaces, music halls, seaside resorts, and football clubs, as well as the more peculiar attractions of the pleasure garden and international exposition, ranging from parachuting monkeys and human zoos to theme park thrill rides. He explores how vibrant mass entertainment came to dominate leisure time and how the attempts of religious groups and secular improvers to curb 'immorality' in the pub, variety theater, and dance hall faltered in the face of commercial success.
The Victorians' unbounded love of leisure created a nationally significant and influential economic force: the modern entertainment industry.
The sequel to 'Dead Men Walking', encouraging men to discover what it means to be truly masculine.
Baz and Lee (authors of Dead Men Walking) once again provide an astonishingly frank, honest and bold account of what it means to be a man trying to follow the ways of Jesus in the 21st century.
How do men harness their passion and aggression, give everything in relationships and ultimately attract more real men' into a genuine relationship with God.
This book is for all men but especially for those who are fed up of wearing masks and are desperate for reality with God, each other and themselves.
Packed full of quotes, humor, information and true stories, it's raw, gritty and a breath of fresh air.
There are questions for discussion at the end of each chapter.
... courageous, funny, adventurous and as honest as a bunch of lads chatting on a long road trip while the radio plays.From the Foreword by Pete Greig.
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