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

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.