One Hot Summer cover art

One Hot Summer

Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858

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One Hot Summer

By: Rosemary Ashton
Narrated by: Corrie James
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About this listen

While 1858 in London may have been noteworthy for its broiling summer months and the related stench of the sewage-filled Thames River, the year is otherwise little remembered. And yet, historian Rosemary Ashton reveals in this compelling microhistory, 1858 was marked by significant, if unrecognized, turning points. For ordinary people, and also for the rich, famous, and powerful, the months from May to August turned out to be a summer of consequence.

Ashton mines Victorian letters and gossip, diaries, court records, newspapers, and other contemporary sources to uncover historically crucial moments in the lives of three protagonists - Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Disraeli. She also introduces others who gained renown in the headlines of the day, among them George Eliot, Karl Marx, William Thackeray, and Edward Bulwer Lytton. Ashton reveals invisible threads of connection among Londoners at every social level in 1858, bringing the celebrated city and its citizens vibrantly to life.

©2017 Rosemary Ashton (P)2017 Tantor 19th Century Art & Literature Authors Europe Great Britain Modern Politics & Activism Presidents & Heads of State Professionals & Academics Science & Technology England Suspenseful

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All stars
Most relevant  
Unnecessarily repetitive and sometimes actually quite boring, but I set the reading speed on .9 and used it for when I wanted to go to sleep. Worked a treat.

Tedious but useful

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3.5 stars: I very much enjoyed this book. It examines the summer of 1858 and the months that surround that summer to delve into London in that period in a social history. I liked the idea of telling history from the news bulletins of the period, minutes of events, and the letters of the principle cast. In fairness it does not develop any very significant connections between the three great figures and / or much connect to the heat wave itself but I felt this was not a loss as such. Would have liked more on the Atlantic telegraph pole.

One Hot Summer

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A delightful book, beautifully read.

Rosemary Ashton is one of our most engaging and readable literary critics and historians, author of, among other things, a superb biography of George Eliot, Everything here is presented with great clarity and charm, The Victorian elite can be monumentally dull company but this book presents Darwin, Disraeli, Dickens and others as lively, vivid presences, their world comes to life.

The only horrid flaw in this outstanding production is the weirdly obtuse, American calendar being used. It seems Americans can't understand the phrase "the first of May..." I think Dickens's friend was John Forster. Not John Foster.

Otherwise Corrie James speaks English English perfectly!

Superb survey of the Victorian London landscape.

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As someone who loves a historical fact book, I really enjoyed this. The 1850 is fascinating; easy to image, so close in time and yet totally different to today.
Although there was a strong story at times I was overwhelmed with facts. The researching must have been immense.

Full of facts

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Informative and highly entertaining in parts but I found it disappointingly dull and disjointed in parts too.

Good in parts

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Read as part of a book club. I thought it was going to be the story of the building of the intersecting sewers and the embanking of the Thames. It's not. What it is, is repetitive, dull, but well-researched histories of three victorians whose connection to one another seems to be that they're men, that their surnames begin with the letter D and that they were alive during the hot summer of 1858, other than that, not much.

Will it never end?

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I genuinely don’t understand why people from the country in which books are set cannot be hired to read them. The horrible American pronunciation of dates, place and key character names is just awful, notwithstanding poor editing which resulted in the repetitiveness experienced by others. I gave up and returned it unfinished. I was glad to do so.

Yet another British historical read by an American

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