"Combining an overview of metropolitan visual culture with detailed textual analysis, this interdisciplinary study offers an interpretation of how Londoners sought to make sense of the social transformations of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It argues that they lived in two cities simultaneously: the actual spaces of the metropolis, which can be analysed into a socially stratified and gendered topography; and an imaginary 'London', an 'Unreal City' which both reflected and shaped their understanding of the 'real' metropolis, and influenced their actions in that environment." "Including 40 in-text illustrations, Imagining London, 1770-1900 provides the reader with a unique understanding of how London was imagined textually and visually in the late Georgian and Victorian period."--BOOK JACKET.