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George Hudson was the greatest British railway entrepreneur of the 19th century. In 1848, he controlled over 1,000 miles of railway and, when it came to railway promotion, it seemed he could do no wrong. However, in early 1849 it came to light that some of his business methods had been less than ethical and he was forced to relinquish the chairmanship of each of his companies. His fall from grace was spectacular and his detractors, of whom there were many, were quick to denounce him as a fraudster, a charlatan and a crook. Even today, when the name George Hudson is mentioned, these same insults are often levelled at him. This new biography takes a fresh look at Hudson’s extraordinary life, from his humble beginnings as a farmer’s boy, to becoming Lord Mayor of York before catching the railway bug. He was MP for Sunderland between 1845 and 1859. After his fall from grace, Hudson endured a 20-year court battle with the York and North Midland Railway (subsequently the North Eastern Railway) for outstanding debts. Hudson made many mistakes in creating his railway empire, but did he deserve all the vitriol that still accompanies his reputation? In seeking to answer this question, Matthew Wells looks at the evidence, including what was said about Hudson during his lifetime and what Hudson himself had to say about the actions he took.
* The Robert Maxwell of the nineteenth century * Victorian England 's greatest capitalist * Brought down by a shareholder 's question The building of the railways in Britain in the nineteenth century was the greatest ever industrial undertaking in the world to that time.Financed by private enterprise rather than the state, the schemes to build new lines were characterised both by their ambition and by their need for huge amounts of capital.The most ambitious of all of the individual entrepreneurs, and for long the most successful, was George Hudson, the 'Railway King ', whose establishment of York as the hub of an ever-growing network of lines brought him huge wealth and great fame. Already a wealthy businessman and Lord Mayor of York before the advent of the railways, Hudson seized the opportunity they presented with both hands.He became an MP, lived in style and entertained lavishly.While his early lines were profitable, later ones were not.Ever more deeply committed, at a time when accounting standards were lax, he hid inconvenient figures until brought down by a question at a shareholders 'meeting in 1849.Disgraced, he fled to the Continent, his name synonymous with fraudulent capitalism at its most brazen.This new biography is the fullest examination to date of an extraordinary and complex man and his career.
Although a great deal has been published on the economic, social and engineering history of nineteenth-century railways, the work of historical geographers has been much less conspicuous. This overview by David Turnock goes a long way towards restoring the balance. It details every important aspect of the railway’s influence on spatial distribution of economic and social change, providing a full account of the nineteenth-century geography of the British Isles seen in the context of the railway. The book reviews and explains the shape of the developing railway network, beginning with the pre-steam railways and connections between existing road and water communications and the new rail lines. The author also discusses the impact of the railways on the patterns of industrial, urban and rural change throughout the century. Throughout, the historical geography of Ireland is treated in equal detail to that of Great Britain.
Victorian Narrative Technologies tells the story of how the British, who wanted nothing to do with the Suez Canal during the decades in which it was being internationally planned and invested, came to own it. It stands to reason that the nation that prided itself on its engineering prowess and had more to gain than any other in the construction of a direct route to India would have played a role in its making. Yet the British shied away from any participation in the international project—only to swoop down on the finished project and claim it as their own when they purchased it in 1875, an event which led directly to Egypt’s colonization in 1882. Murray uncovers the little-known story of Britain’s swing from ambivalence about to acceptance of what would become a potent symbol of Western imperialism. Beginning with the railway mania of the 1840s and concluding with the opening of the new global routes of the 1870s, Murray argues that changes in notions about character, investment, and technology propagated in the novel form over this period enabled Britain to lay claim to the globe. Arguing that literary genre was itself a technology that spread imperialism, Murray shows how roads, canals, and novels together colonized the Middle East.
Focusing on the language, style, and poetry of Dickens’ novels, this study breaks new ground in reading Dickens’ novels as a unique form of poetry. Dickens’ writing disallows the statement of single unambiguous truths and shows unconscious processes burrowing within language, disrupting received ideas and modes of living. Arguing that Dickens, within nineteenth-century modernity, sees language as always double, Tambling draws on a wide range of Victorian texts and current critical theory to explore Dickens’ interest in literature and popular song, and what happens in jokes, in caricature, in word-play and punning, and in naming. Working from Dickens’ earliest writings to the latest, deftly combining theory with close analysis of texts, the book examines Dickens’ key novels, such as Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. It considers Dickens as constructing an urban poetry, alert to language coming from sources beyond the individual, and relating that to the dream-life of characters, who both can and cannot awake to fuller, different consciousness. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Lacan, and Derrida, Tambling shows how Dickens writes a new and comic poetry of the city, and that the language constitutes an unconscious and secret autobiography. This volume takes Dickens scholarship in exciting new directions and will be of interest to all readers of nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies, and more widely, to all readers of literature.
The Great Irish Famine remains one of the most lethal famines in modern world history and a watershed moment in the development of modern Ireland – socially, politically, demographically and culturally. In the space of only four years, Ireland lost twenty-five per cent of its population as a consequence of starvation, disease and large-scale emigration. Certain aspects of the Famine remain contested and controversial, for example the issue of the British government’s culpability, proselytism, and the reception of emigrants. However, recent historiographical focus on this famine has overshadowed the impact of other periods of subsistence crisis, both before 1845 and after 1852. The narratives of those who perished, those who survived and those who emigrated form an integral part of this history and these volumes will make available, for the first time, some of the original documentation relating to an event that changed not only Irish history, but the history of the countries to which the emigrants fled – Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia. By bringing together letters, government reports, diaries, official documents, pamphlets, newspaper articles, sermons, eye-witness testimonies, poems and novels, these volumes will provide a fresh way of understanding Irish history in general, and famine and migration in particular. Comprehensive editorial apparatus and annotation of the original texts are included along with bibliographies, appendices, chronologies and indexes that point the way for further study.