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"Absalom Watkin came to Manchester in 1801, a poor boy of fourteen, to work in his uncle's business. Through his eyes we see the growth of Manchester from small manufacturing town to major industrial city and witness the changes that growth imposed on its inhabitants. As a young man, Watkin helped to write the famous Peterloo Protest and also to draw up Manchester's petition in favour of the Great Reform Bill. A sharp and critical observer, he was involved in many of the movements for social reform of his day. His diaries record conversations with famous contemporaries and relate fascinating details of daily living including the prices of food, houses and travel. Although successful in business and public affairs he remained dissatisfied with his own life, unhappy in his marriage and his work, longing, most of all, to write, tend his garden and read alone in his library." "Magdalen Goffin, a descendant of the diarist, has written a commentary which links the diary entries and places them in their historical context. Absalom Watkin's diaries are a valuable social document of an important period in English industrial history."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
"Absalom Watkin came to Manchester in 1801, a poor boy of fourteen, to work in his uncle's business. Through his eyes we see the growth of Manchester from small manufacturing town to major industrial city and witness the changes that growth imposed on its inhabitants. As a young man, Watkin helped to write the famous Peterloo Protest and also to draw up Manchester's petition in favour of the Great Reform Bill. A sharp and critical observer, he was involved in many of the movements for social reform of his day. His diaries record conversations with famous contemporaries and relate fascinating details of daily living including the prices of food, houses and travel. Although successful in business and public affairs he remained dissatisfied with his own life, unhappy in his marriage and his work, longing, most of all, to write, tend his garden and read alone in his library." "Magdalen Goffin, a descendant of the diarist, has written a commentary which links the diary entries and places them in their historical context. Absalom Watkin's diaries are a valuable social document of an important period in English industrial history."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The accomplishments and initiatives, both social and economic, of Edward Watkin are almost too many to relate. Though generally known for his large-scale railway projects, becoming chairman of nine different British railway companies as well as developing railways in Canada, the USA, Greece, India and the Belgian Congo, he was also responsible for a stream of remarkable projects in the nineteenth century which helped shape people’s lives inside and outside Britain. As well as holding senior positions with the London and North Western Railway, the Worcester and Hereford Railway and the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, Watkin became president of the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada. He was also director of the New York, Lake Erie and Western Railways, as well as the Athens–Piraeus Railway. Watkin was also the driving force in the creation of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway’s ‘London Extension’ – the Great Central Main Line down to Marylebone in London. This, though, was only one part of his great ambition to have a high-speed rail link from Manchester to Paris and ultimately to India. This, of course, involved the construction of a Channel tunnel. Work on this began on both sides of the Channel in 1880 but had to be abandoned due to the fear of invasion from the Continent. He also purchased an area of Wembley Park, serviced by an extension of his Metropolitan Railway. He developed the park into a pleasure and events destination for urban Londoners, which later became the site of Wembley Stadium. It was also the site of another of Watkin’s enterprises, the ‘Great Tower in London’ which was designed to be higher than the Eiffel Tower but was never completed. Little, though, is known about Watkin’s personal life, which is explored here through the surviving diaries he kept. The author, who is the chair of The Watkin Society, which aims to promote Watkin’s life and achievements, has delved into the mind of one of the nineteenth century’s outstanding individuals.
This innovative history of popular magical mentalities in nineteenth-century England explores the dynamic ways in which the magical imagination helped people to adjust to urban life. Previous studies of modern popular magical practices and supernatural beliefs have largely neglected the urban experience. Karl Bell, however, shows that the magical imagination was a key cultural resource which granted an empowering sense of plebeian agency in the nineteenth-century urban environment. Rather than portraying magical beliefs and practices as a mere enclave of anachronistic 'tradition' and the fantastical as simply an escapist refuge from the real, he reveals magic's adaptive and transformative qualities and the ways in which it helped ordinary people navigate, adapt to and resist aspects of modern urbanization. Drawing on perspectives from cultural anthropology, sociology, folklore and urban studies, this is a major contribution to our understanding of modern popular magic and the lived experience of modernization and urbanization.
This book is a wide-ranging survey of the rise of mass movements for democracy and workers’ rights in northern England. It is a provocative narrative of the closing down of public space and dispossession from place. The book offers historical parallels for contemporary debates about protests in public space and democracy and anti-globalisation movements. In response to fears of revolution from 1789 to 1848, the British government and local authorities prohibited mass working-class political meetings and societies. Protesters faced the privatisation of public space. The ‘Peterloo Massacre’ of 1819 marked a turning point. Radicals, trade unions and the Chartists fought back by challenging their exclusion from public spaces, creating their own sites and eventually constructing their own buildings or emigrating to America. This book also uncovers new evidence of protest in rural areas of northern England, including rural Luddism. It will appeal to academic and local historians, as well as geographers and scholars of social movements in the UK, France and North America.
Formed in 1839, the Anti-Corn Law League was one of the most important campaigns to introduce the ideas of economic liberalism into mainstream political discourse in Britain. Its aspiration for free trade played a crucial role in defining the agenda of nineteenth-century liberalism and shaping the modern British state. Its faith in the free market still resonates in Britain's public policy debates today. This is the first comprehensive study of the League which makes use of recent methodological developments in social history.
The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a new phenomenon in public monuments and civic ornamentation. Whereas in former times public statuary had customarily been reserved for 'warriors and statesmen, kings and rulers of men', a new trend was emerging for towns to commemorate their own citizens. As the subjects immortalised in stone and bronze broadened beyond the traditional ruling classes to include radicals and reformers, it necessitated a corresponding widening of the language and understanding of public statuary. Contested Sites explores the role of these commemorations in radical public life in Britain. Despite recent advances in the understanding of the importance of symbols in public discourse, political monuments have received little attention from historians. This is to be regretted, for commemorations are statements of public identity and memory that have their politics; they are 'embedded in complex class, gender and power relations that determine what is remembered (or forgotten)'. Examining monuments, plaques and tombstones commemorating a variety of popular movements and reforming individuals, the contributions in Contested Sites reveal the relations that went into the making of public memory in modern Britain and its radical tradition.