ABSTRACT
Henry Brougham, a distinguished polymath and statesman who became Lord Chancellor in 1830, was one of the founders in 1828 of University College, precursor of London University. This institution offered a wide range of lectures on subjects including literature, elocution, the topography of the British Isles and history. Karl Marx, the political refugee and author of The Communist Manifesto, came to London to join the leisured and the studious and to read some of the hundreds of thousands of books in the Reading Room of the British Museum. People read sensational thrillers, ballads and broadsides sold in the streets, published in London mostly by James Catnach in the slummy Seven Dials district. Ventura de la Vega, the Spanish dramatist who visited London at mid-century, was impressed by the devoutness of the worshippers in Westminster Abbey. Victorian London combined the greatest incidence of Anglican marriages with the lowest level of church attendance.
