(HIST009) The Victorian City in History, Literature and Art

London, view of Elizabeth Tower (Big Ben) at dusk

Overview

Course start date: Tuesday 22nd April 2025
Course end date: Friday 27th June 2025
Early Bird Price: £135
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Tutor:  Lynne Thompson
Course Code: HIST009
Level: Non-accredited, non-credit bearing
Assessments/Exams: None. Throughout the course you will be given ideas and questions to respond to in the online discussion area. Participation in online discussion is encouraged, but not compulsory.
Duration: 10 weeks
Estimated Student Study Time: 5 – 8 hours per week are recommended, but time spent is flexible and at your discretion.
Fee: £150.00
Pre-Requisites: No academic qualifications or experience of studying history, archaeology, art or literature are required – only a strong enthusiasm for this subject.
Delivery: Online Distance Learning
Late Entrants: If this course is not full by the start date then late entrants will be accepted for up to two weeks after the start of the course. As a late entrant you can choose to catch up on the material you have missed or you can skip the missed weeks and concentrate on the material at the point where you join the course, but unfortunately we cannot offer fee reductions or course extensions for late entrants.
Recommended Reading**:

  • Briggs, A (1968) Victorian Cities, Penguin: Harmondsworth.
  • Engels, F (1845, many editions, including a new one with an introduction by Tristram Hunt, 2009) The Condition of the Working Class in England, Panther paperback.
  • Hunt, T (2004) Building Jerusalem: the rise and fall of the Victorian city, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
  • Wise, S (2008) The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum, London: Bodley Head.

Other texts will be recommended throughout the course.

Required Reading**: There are no required texts for this course.

**Please note: All courses are subject to sufficient numbers of students registering before they are confirmed as running. Therefore, after booking your place you are advised not to purchase any texts until you have received confirmation that the course is running.

This course was previously offered by the University of Exeter*. If you studied it with the University of Exeter* you might not wish to study it again with Learn for Pleasure as although we have revised and updated our courses where necessary, it will likely be substantively the same.

Summary

This course aims to introduce you to the key debates which surround nineteenth century urbanisation and the development of the Victorian city. The course will focus on the response of Victorian men and women to ‘the age of great cities’, and the social problems which accompanied it. It will also look at how the art and literature of the period portrayed the Victorian city.

After discussing the nineteenth-century idea of the city, the course will include the examination of attitudes towards urban poverty, housing and public health; an assessment of the growth in the role of local government; the response of organised religion to urbanisation; the particular way in which women were viewed in the public space of the city; the dominance of Victorian London; the spread of the suburbs; and the Victorian city through the medium of art and literature. The course will conclude by looking the critical debate on urbanisation which took place at the end of the nineteenth century, led by William Morris and H. G. Wells.

The aims of the course are:

  • to provide you with a ‘taste’ of history, and enough knowledge and skills to proceed with confidence to other, more specialist courses if you wish,
  • to add to your personal enjoyment of the subject,
  • to develop further your powers of reading, understanding, and analysis. The course will encourage you to step back and look at past events with a degree of objectivity.

Syllabus Plan

Week 01: The ‘Age of Great Cities’

Week 02: Victorian London and The Industrial City

Week 03: Poverty, the Slums, and the Question of Class Relations

Week 04: Women and the City

Week 05: Public Health in the Cities in Mid-Victorian Britain

Week 06: The Religious Response to Urbanisation

Week 07: The Victorian City in Art and Literature

Week 08: The Development of Municipal Government and the Growth of the Suburbs

Week 09: The City and Leisure

Week 10: The Victorian City Debate at the End of the Nineteenth Century

Learning Outcomes

This course will help students to acquire:

  • Knowledge of city life and the development of the city during the Victorian period,
  • An awareness of the underlying concepts and debates relating to this subject area,
  • Experience of analysing source material.