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The first history of the West End of London, showing how the nineteenth-century growth of theatres, opera houses, galleries, restaurants, department stores, casinos, exhibition centres, night clubs, street life, and the sex industry shaped modern culture and consumer society, and made London a world centre of entertainment and glamour.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part I: The Aristocratic West End 1800-1850
- 1: Drury Lane, 1800
- 2: Arcadia
- 3: The Beau Monde
- 4: The Histrionic Art
- 5: Curiosity
- Part II: The Bourgeois West End, 1850-1914
- 6: The Making of the West End, 1850-1914
- 7: Capital of Pleasure
- 8: Capital of Culture
- Part III: Showbiz
- 9: The Age of Boucicault, 1843-1880
- 10: Theatreland, 1880-1914
- 11: The Populist Palatial
- 12: Gaiety Nights
- Part IV: Hospitality
- 13: Eating Out
- 14: Grand Hotel
- 15: Shopocracy
- Part V: Heart of Empire
- 16: The Other West End
About the author
Rohan McWilliam is Professor of Modern British History at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge and a former President of the British Association for Victorian Studies. A co-director of the Labour History Research Unit at Anglia Ruskin, he is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Victorian Culture and the London Journal. He is also on the Retrieving data. Wait a few seconds and try to cut or copy again. Nineteenth-Century Studies and New Directions in Social and Cultural History. He has published widely on topics ranging from Victorian melodrama to the Labour Party in the 1980s, from the Victorian novelist G.W.M. Reynolds to the director Jonathan Miller. His edited collection on the Victorian publisher Edward Lloyd was the subject of a Times Leader column in 2019.
Summary
The first history of the West End of London, showing how the nineteenth-century growth of theatres, opera houses, galleries, restaurants, department stores, casinos, exhibition centres, night clubs, street life, and the sex industry shaped modern culture and consumer society, and made London a world centre of entertainment and glamour.
Additional text
McWilliam does an admirable job of never allowing the reader to forget these backstage realities while narrating the rise of the West End's public pleasures.
