Customer Rating:  
Summary: No maps
Comment: Why no maps?
Unless you are familiar with London how are you to know where Farringdon Road is, where Pimlico, where the rookery of St Giles or Seven Dials?
A great read - but with no maps to illustrate where we are at any one time (we zip all over the place in the first three chapters) I am lost.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A good and interesting read
Comment: This book sparked my interest in London's history generally because you can clearly relate the happenings and statistics in this book to our present times and recent past. A thoroughly enjoyable read, and I'm looking forward to reading his 20th century history of London.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fascinating - History made real
Comment: This book is both informative and entertaining. What I find particularly fascinating are the various similarities to own period. Problems such as overcrowding, street crime - even the fact that statistically at least, crime figures fell during the course of the century, but people "felt" surrounded by it - seems to be remarkably familiar. I for one have to confess to a much more "cosy" image of the Victorian period (probably fuelled by too many middle-class novels and an "Upstairs Downstairs"-type of preconception. So it was most educational to be told how things really were.
Customer Rating:
Summary: simply great
Comment: A magical trip thru 19th.century London,it does not falter in its quest to paint a picture with words----an ex-London Cabbie.
Customer Rating:
Summary: As thorough as a text book - as entertaining as a novel
Comment: The breadth of this book would be astonishing enough if it wasn't also for it's coherent structure and - most importantly - lively writing. Mr White knows his subject, but he doesn't lose his thread beneath a mountain of statistics or (Peter Ackroyd take note) lose himself in flights of fancy. He brilliantly portrays, above all, the human drama which makes this such an exciting - and unique - period of history.
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