Hello there Professor Swafford and fellow classmates! My name is Shianne (pronounced shy-ann). I am a senior, and an English major. I’m very excited to get to know all of you and learn about Victorian London. I have never been to London, or any part of Europe for that matter, but will be travelling there this winter for a couple weeks. I am very excited to get to visually compare what we will be learning in this course with my own experiences in London this coming winter.

I found the reading to be a really great overview of Victorian London; I know very little about the history and geography of London and found this article to be a helpful start. I (unsurprisingly) learned that London, like many large cities, was divided into “rich” and “poor” areas–the North and West being the wealthy, safe areas, and the South and East being the poor, and more dangerous living and working areas. However, I found interesting that the introduction of various forms of transportation, as well as Acts created to stabalize low costs of transportation (i.e The Cheap Trains Act of 1883), allowed for lower working class London residents to move into safer, surrounding areas such as West Ham and Walthamstow. The accessiblility of transportation to non-wealthy residents feels very progressive for its time. Furthermore, the growth and success of charity and city-funded public places (i.e. museums, parks, munipal housing) is also incredibly progressive, especially when London was just being built from the ground up less than two hundred years earlier. I found it admirable that municipal housing for the poor is not a new concept, and has been existant in large cities for nearly two centuries. I was also incredibly impressed to learn how quickly railways, both above ground and below, were assembled. In just 25 years, London revolutionized transportation and working life by the addition of the railway system.