The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City

Building Jerusalem

'History writing at its compulsive best' A. N. Wilson 
 
This is a history of the ideas that shaped not only London, but Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield and other power-houses of 19th-century Britain. It charts the controversies and visions that fostered Britain's greatest civic renaissance. 
 
Tristram Hunt explores the horrors of the Victorian city, as seen by Dickens, Engels and Carlyle; the influence of the medieval Gothic ideal of faith, community and order espoused by Pugin and Ruskin; the pride in self-government, identified with the Saxons as opposed to the Normans; the identification with the city republics of the Italian renaissance - commerce, trade and patronage; the change from the civic to the municipal, and greater powers over health, education and housing; and finally at the end of the century, the retreat from the urban to the rural ideal, led by William Morris and the garden-city movement of Ebenezer Howard.

A key text which should be read by all politicians and by anyone interested in the way we live now. It is deeply researched, but written in an highly accessible way, and the reader never loses sight of the vitally relevant and interesting story Tristram Hunt has to tell. It is history writing at its compulsive best.

What matters is his book's prodigious range and passionate enthusiasm, and his skill in showing how ideas, however foolish, can take over minds, change landscapes and mould the future. It is a rich, nutritious read.

Ten Cities that Made an Empire

From Tristram Hunt, award-winning author of The Frock-Coated Communist and leading UK politician, Ten Cities that Made an Empire presents a new approach to Britain's imperial past through the cities that epitomised it 
 
Since the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 and the end days of Empire, Britain's colonial past has been the subject of passionate debate. Tristram Hunt goes beyond the now familiar arguments about Empire being good or bad and adopts a fresh approach to Britain's empire and its legacy. Through an exceptional array of first-hand accounts and personal reflections, he portrays the great colonial and imperial cities of Boston, Bridgetown, Dublin, Cape Town, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Bombay, Melbourne, New Delhi, and twentieth-century Liverpool: their architecture, culture, and society balls; the famines, uprisings and repressions which coursed through them; the primitive accumulation and ghostly bureaucracy which ran them; the British supremacists and multicultural trailblazers who inhabited them. 
 
From the pioneers of early America to the builders of modern India, from west to east and back again, Hunt follows the processes of exchange and adaptation that collectively moulded the colonial experience and which in their turn transformed the culture, economy and identity of the British Isles. This vivid and richly detailed imperial story, located in ten of the most important cities which the Empire constructed, demolished, reconstructed and transformed, allows us a new understanding of the British Empire's influence upon the world and the world's influence upon it. 
 
Praise for The Frock-Coated Communist: 
 
'Beautifully written and consistently engaging' - Independent 
 
'An excellent book ... Hunt has a mastery of 19th-century British culture and European political thought' - Robert Service, Sunday Times 
 
'Thoughtful and engaging' - Telegraph Review

A grand history of the British empire ... this is a book about ideas, for all that it is rich in architectural description, economic fact and colourful anecdote ... well-written, cleverly constructed and beautifully balanced

Ingenious and timely ... Hunt skilfully constructs his itinerary to provide a lively and cliché-busting survey of imperial history ... he uses the urban lens to terrific effect

An original and inventive approach to tackling empire ... This is a book which is experienced through the life on the streets, in the buildings and across the physical layout of large urban centres, where jostled men and women of different races and creeds ... readable and engaging ... It is a work of great ambition ... impressive

Since the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 and the end days of Empire, Britain's colonial past has been the subject of passionate debate. Tristram Hunt goes beyond the now familiar arguments about Empire being good or bad and adopts a fresh approach to Britain's empire and its legacy. Through an exceptional array of first-hand accounts and personal reflections, he portrays the great colonial and imperial cities of Boston, Bridgetown, Dublin, Cape Town, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Bombay, Melbourne, New Delhi, and twentieth-century Liverpool: their architecture, culture, and society balls; the famines, uprisings and repressions which coursed through them; the primitive accumulation and ghostly bureaucracy which ran them; the British supremacists and multicultural trailblazers who inhabited them. 
 
From the pioneers of early America to the builders of modern India, from west to east and back again, Hunt follows the processes of exchange and adaptation that collectively moulded the colonial experience and which in their turn transformed the culture, economy and identity of the British Isles. This vivid and richly detailed imperial story, located in ten of the most important cities which the Empire constructed, demolished, reconstructed and transformed, allows us a new understanding of the British Empire's influence upon the world and the world's influence upon it.

The English Civil War At First Hand

Tristram Hunt is one of Britain's best known young historians. Educated at Cambridge and Chicago Universities, he is lecturer in British history at Queen Mary, University of London and author of 'Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City' and The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. A leading historical broadcaster, he has authored numerous series for BBC radio and television and Channel 4. He is also a regular contributor to The Times, The Guardian and The Observer.

Almost a quarter of a million lives were lost as King and Parliament battled for their religious and political ideals in the English Civil War. England was divided between Cavaliers and Roundheads engaged in bitter struggles from Preston to Lostwithiel, Pembroke to York. Armies were on the march, villages were decimated and great dynasties destroyed: fathers and sons, uncles and cousins were pitted against each other in defence of their loyalties. The civil war led to the execution of a king, the beginnings of sectarian division in Ireland, savage clan warfare in Scotland and the roots of English socialism. 
 
Tristram Hunt avoids adding to the many, mostly transitory interpretations of the civil war and instead offers a timeless narrative based on the first-hand accounts of those who witnessed these traumatic events. In doing so he brings out the voices of the civil war generation - those who lost sons, who witnessed massacres and who fought for an ideal. In this book we see their motivations, fears and misery as the horror of war overwhelmed them. From Cromwell's letters to the memoirs of a Roundhead wife the civil war era is brought to life in all its terrible and fascinating glory.

The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels

The Frock-Coated Communist

Beautifully written and consistently engaging

An excellent book ... Hunt has a mastery of 19th-century British culture and European political thought

Friedrich Engels is one of the most attractive and contradictory figures of the nineteenth century. Born to a prosperous mercantile family in west Germany, he spent his career working in the Manchester cotton industry, riding to the Cheshire hounds, and enjoying the comfortable, middle-class life of a Victorian gentleman. Yet Engels was also the co-founder of international communism - the philosophy which in the 20th century came to control one third of the human race. He was the co-author of The Communist Manifesto, a ruthless party tactician, and the man who sacrificed his best years so Karl Marx could write Das Kapital. Tristram Hunt relishes the diversity and exuberance of Engels's era: how one of the great bon viveurs of Victorian Britain reconciled his raucous personal life with this uncompromising political philosophy.

Tristram Hunt

This is a remarkable and impassioned book. Josiah Wedgwood innovated across boundaries of technology and art and taste, commerce and scientific enquiry, and Tristram Hunt makes the powerful case for rediscovering his humane entrepreneurial spirit. The Radical Potter brings Wedgwood's protean energy alive for a new generation and I loved it.

impassioned, wide-ranging ... Hunt's sympathetic, engaged and finely written biography makes it clear that [Wedgwood] was a one-off, and a genius.

fabulously unputdownable ... In parts it reads like a thriller.

Wedgwood's remarkable story has been told in many biographies over the years. The great contribution of The Radical Potter, Tristram Hunt's new book, is to place him in the context of the rapid economic and social changes during his lifetime that helped make his success possible.

this brisk and highly readable biography ... places Wedgwood in a dissenting tradition that goes back to the civil wars ... It is a timely tale.

engrossing ... Hunt, as director of the Victoria and Albert Museum and MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central from 2010 to 2017, is uniquely fitted to write this book.

superb ... this delicious, meticulously researched, wide-ranging but never long-winded book made me admire Tristram Hunt as well as Josiah Wedgwood.

Hunt is exquisitely alive to all the contradictions in Wedgwood's achievements ... a rich portrait of the charismatic but contradictory man who made Georgian Britain the most stylish country in the world

One of the achievements of Tristram Hunt's biography... is too bring into view the commercial and moral instincts of the man behind the powerhouse ... Wedgwood emerges from this books as a man of voracious interest in the world. Canny and determined, he had both strong beliefs and the adaptability that marks any great innovator. Hunt ... is as interested in what the man can tell us about the times as the times meant for the man.

Tristram Hunt, one of our finest historians, has done a magnificent job in The Radical Potter. Every chapter made me cheer and halloo.

this attractively packaged ... splendid... biography of ceramics impresario Josiah Wedgwood ... reminds us not only of what has been lost in terms of manufacturing, but what can be regained.

Hunt performs the important task of telling the great potter's story clearly and accessibly ... Wedgwood the man should be as famous as Wedgwood the brand. That he is not might be due to his business - there are more heroic and glamorous trades than making pots - and to the national tendency to undervalue manufacturing. Hunt's book should help to correct that imbalance.

The Radical Potter sees Tristram Hunt argue that Wedgwood was epicentral to the transformation of Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries ... This is a remarkable book from a historian at the top of his game.

Confident ... Hunt makes sure Wedgwood's pots stay at the heart of his biography

easily the best account of that multi-faceted genius

The indefatigable one-legged artist and abolitionist Josiah Wedgwood personified the optimism of Georgian Britain. Hunt brings him brilliantly to life.

Josiah Wedgwood was "the Steve Jobs" of the 18th century, according to Tristram Hunt, the historian and V&amp;A director. Wedgwood, of modest background but expansive inventive genius, turned a Staffordshire pottery firm into a global company, one that showed that Britain could make high-quality porcelain, a high-demand product in the new age of tea drinking. Not bad for a man who couldn't turn a wheel because childhood disease disabled one of his legs. He was nicknamed "Owd Wooden Leg" by his workers - and referred to the day he lost his limb as "Saint Amputation Day".

Tristram Hunt, in The Radical Potter, underlines brilliantly the consumerism and politics of the age in the character of Josiah Wedgwood, in whom we can see all the energy of the era - the campaign for abolition, the birth of international trade, the stirrings of the industrial revolution, the combination of mass production and aesthetic sense.

Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain

Josiah Wedgwood, perhaps the greatest English potter who ever lived, epitomized the best of his age. From his kilns and workshops in Stoke-on-Trent, he revolutionized the production of ceramics in Georgian Britain by marrying technology with design, manufacturing efficiency and retail flair. He transformed the luxury markets not only of London, Liverpool, Bath and Dublin but of America and the world, and helping to usher in a mass consumer society. Tristram Hunt calls him 'the Steve Jobs of the eighteenth century'. 
 
But Wedgwood was radical in his mind and politics as well as in his designs. He campaigned for free trade and religious toleration, read pioneering papers to the Royal Society and was a member of the celebrated Lunar Society of Birmingham. Most significantly, he created the ceramic 'Emancipation Badge', depicting a slave in chains and inscribed 'Am I Not a Man and a Brother?' that became the symbol of the abolitionist movement. 
 
Tristram Hunt's hugely enjoyable new biography, strongly based on Wedgwood's notebooks, letters and the words of his contemporaries, brilliantly captures the energy and originality of Wedgwood and his extraordinary contribution to the transformation of eighteenth-century Britain.

Tristram Hunt

Praise for The Radical Potter

This is a remarkable and impassioned book. Josiah Wedgwood innovated across boundaries of technology and art and taste, commerce and scientific enquiry, and Tristram Hunt makes the powerful case for rediscovering hi ...

impassioned, wide-ranging ... Hunt's sympathetic, engaged and finely written biography makes it clear that [Wedgwood] was a one-off, and a genius.

fabulously unputdownable ... In parts it reads like a thriller.

This is a remarkable and impassioned book. Josiah Wedgwood innovated across boundaries of technology and art and taste, commerce and scientific enquiry, and Tristram Hunt makes the powerful case for rediscovering hi ...

impassioned, wide-ranging ... Hunt's sympathetic, engaged and finely written biography makes it clear that [Wedgwood] was a one-off, and a genius.

fabulously unputdownable ... In parts it reads like a thriller.

This is a remarkable and impassioned book. Josiah Wedgwood innovated across boundaries of technology and art and taste, commerce and scientific enquiry, and Tristram Hunt makes the powerful case for rediscovering hi ...

impassioned, wide-ranging ... Hunt's sympathetic, engaged and finely written biography makes it clear that [Wedgwood] was a one-off, and a genius.

fabulously unputdownable ... In parts it reads like a thriller.

Books by Tristram Hunt

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter