Rediscovering History

About this book

If one were to search for a common and often explicit theme that underlay the different responses of writers and social critics to the big cities of the nineteenth century, it would perhaps be found in the general concept of "estrangement": the estrangement of the inhabitant of a city too rapidly changing and enlarging to comprehend in traditional terms; the estrangement of classes from each other, of individual from individual, of individual from self, of workers from work.