First Impressions: Contemporary Accounts of Victorian Wolverton

Description

On September 17th 1838 the directors of the London and Birmingham Railway Company, together with other dignitaries, steamed through Wolverton to celebrate the opening day of the new railway line. Wolverton’s destiny was therefore to change from a rural community to a forward looking industrial town. That event took place 175 years ago and today Wolverton is a very different place but in those early days Wolverton was a place of great interest and excitement to those early Victorians and a good many stopped by to learn about the railway works and the new town which had grown up quickly to support it. To mark this anniversary this book brings together a good deal of the material about Wolverton that survives from those very early years. The collection includes personal memoirs, travel guides, engineer’s reports, engravings, letters, board minutes, plans, trade directories, railway reports, newspaper articles and selects the material that is pertient to Wolverton. The collection is less of a narrative than a resource for interested historians, but it does bring together material from a variety of archives into a single volume. As you read through, however, you will see Wolverton through the eyes of early Victorians.