he worked the streets. -- he walked the streets. he had very bad insomnia, so he used to walk at night. and he described what he saw in his journalism. and i realized what we had taken in his novels for wonderful, imaginative writing actually was stuff he'd seen. and that was really interesting. >> host: how well known was charles dixens during his -- dickens during his time, and why did you use him in your subtitle of that booksome. >> guest: dickens was extraordinarily well known. dickens was a rock star. dickens was the mick jagger of his day, everybody knew him. and what was interesting i found through his life -- and he was very young, he was only 58 when he died. >> host: what did he die of? >> guest: hard work. i think he probably died of a stroke, but he was worn out. through his life i found descriptions of him, people who had just seen him in the streets and knew who he was, sort of

wrote this their diaries, saw charles dickens in the street today. this is what he looks like. and you could follow their descriptions, which was great. i used him partly because it was the 200th anniversary, and my publisher taught it would be a great idea, but that was a little part. what he actually said to me was all your books are a disguised love letter to dickens, why don't you just let your head go and really use him? so i did. >> host: was he right? >> guest: he was right. >> host: why? >> guest: i think dickens was one of the greatest writers ever. horrible man. horrible man. but one of the greatest writers ever. i reread his books more than almost anything. >> host: is there a typical, for that book, is there a typical life that you can describe, a victorian life?

>> guest: um, i think that the typical lives, if you want, are the lives of what in those days would have either been called the working poor or the lower middle classes. one of the things that was so remarkable to me -- and, actually, taught me a good lesson about living in london -- was how everybody walked. and there are these amazing descriptions of early morning and late evening of all the clarks in american -- clerks walking into work. and they describe just these lines of black, these black-coated workers walking in. and i found a description one man who did this every day, maybe walks 2, 3, 4, 5 miles in

each direction. and one man said the route was so crowded with these men, and it was so regimented that he would buy a newspaper as he set off in the might newspaper, ande would read it all the way because you just had to keep going. i mean, there was -- and what would happen as they went in, the roads were sometimes paved, sometimes not. and hundreds of thousands of horses. so you can imagine what was on the roads. and so what you had were, first, you had crossing sweepers who were usually very poor boys who stood at intervals and swept the path clear in front of you. and you gave them a half a penny or something as you passed. and they did this every day.

and then also as you went in there were shoe blacks, because the roads were so disgusting that you couldn't arrive at the office clean. and so these, again, were poor boys with no other form of income. and they would stand by the side of the street, and as you got close to your office and you were prepared to turn off, you would get your shoes polished and the bottoms of your trousers brushed, again, for half a penny. and then you would go into your office, you would be expected to be there by about eight in the morning. you would work all day. you might have lunch break, but most likely not. i read one extraordinary thing which can said the post office which, of course, was an enormous governmental employer, they finally gave the workers 15 minutes for lunch because the postmaster general, the man at the very top, got so tired of seeing these sort of trays coming in and out from local

taverns where people were ordering their lunch. so they got a whole 15 minutes to nip out and get something. and it depended, obviously, what time your office closed depending hugely on what you did. but they had something that were called foreign post nights which was the night that the mail went out to catch the ships. and, you know, some say it was tuesday and thursday for the states and wednesday and friday for india. and so on foreign nights you had to stay later to get the last post out so that it could go and get the ship. so you might be working from 8 in the morning til 11 at night. and then walk your 5 niles home -- miles home again. so victorian life was unbelievably hard. >> host: what was life like for the upper class, for queen

victoria, for the royal family? >> guest: um, i know much less about the upper classes because i'm not very interested in them. woman confesses she's not interested in rich. shock. i think it was very dull. i think it was very comfortable and very dull. technology had made life a lot more comfortable. you had better lighting, gaslighting had come, the arrival of better individual lighting like kerosene, paraffin had arrived. but you traveled, travel was easier. you had trains now. and first class was extremely comfortable by trains. harriet beecher said when she came -- stowe said when she came to visit that it was beyond compare, and also, she added, beyond price.

it was very expensive. but it was very luxurious. so probably like today. if you had a lot of money, life was really rather pleasant. i think it must have been ghastly if you were a woman. >> host: why? >> guest: because you weren't allowed to do anything. >> host: did women of the lower classes work? >> guest: they worked. the two main employers of women in the 19th century, one was service, being a maid. and the other was the textile industry, and they saw the employment of most women. but, you know, you could be a green grocer's wife, and you worked in a shop, or you could be what was called a coster monger which meant you sold fruit and vegetables from a cart. i mean, there were, you know, if you were poor, you did anything to survive.

but if you were middle class, the whole way of proving you were middle class was that you didn't have to work, and it's unbelievably boring. all of these hobbies we read about, all of these sort of demented women's hobbies such as embroidery and 74 kinds of knitting and making shell boxes and decorating picture frames and scrap -- it's just a way of trying to fill time. >> host: judith flanders, london today a very clean city, seems very clean. the air's clean, the streets are very clean. would charles dickens recognize -- >> guest: oh, no. the dirt in the london was a biword because london was in the 19th century the largest city the world had ever seen. and it had taken this huge population increase but was

mostly -- or it was a building site. as the railways were coming in, that was being built, the bridges were being built, everything was being built. so i think most of the time it just looked like a bomb site. but also there were the amazing problems that no one had ever had to deal with of what to do with animal waste, what to do with human waste. at the time it was all dumped in the river. and so london was also, because it was the first in so many things, it also had to work out the first solutions. and in 1858 they had the second of two very hot summers. hot in england, probably meaning 70. but anyway, it was hot. and the thames then was a tidal river, so low and high tide. and when the tide went out,

there was so much sewage on the banks and particularly as it got hotter and hotter and hotter that it actually fermented. and, of course, you have very pretty little picture right there. the houses of parliament are on the river. as we know, nothing makes money easily more available than the great and good being inconvenienced. and they -- parliament couldn't sit. the smell was so disgusting, they actually originally they hung ships dipped in chloride lime all along the river frontage to try and keep the smell out. that didn't work and, actually, there was a report i found of one cabinet meeting being broken up with gladstone and disraeli and everybody rushing out with handkerchiefs running out gagging. the money was found, i know this will come as a surprise. and so they put into action this huge suer building project -- sewer building project.

and what they did was they built out into the thames what now we call an embankment. and underneath are these enormous sewer pipes which take everything out to be treated, sort of out of london. and this was so important that actually when the big treatment plant outside london was finally opened, the prince of wales was the official opener of it. i mean, they knew what it was like without. and i actually went a few weeks ago. it was unbelievably thrilling. i went down the sewers. >> host: why? >> guest: oh, to see. i mean, to see this 19th century cathedral down there. it is a cathedral. it's amazing. i had to wear, you know, an all inform-in-one thing and flusherman's boots. it was unimaginable.

i mean, you see big metal what looked like big metal plaques, must be 15x15 feet. and you realize they're panels, and they swing out, and that's where all the water rushes through. and the guys were going, oh, yes, well, it rained last night, so you see that mark up there? that's where the sewage got to. um, being a historian, it's just all fun. just are you writing about london -- >> host: are you writing about london underground, in a sense? >> guest: well, in the victorian city, i did write a bit about sewers because the city is built on them. you can't have a big city without having proper sewers. and one of the things, of course, was in the 19th century, it was a century of epidemics precisely because of lack of sewage and overcrowding. and one of the things you can see is as the sewers arrive

across the city, the epidemics disappear. and the final cholera epidemic in europe, in england was in 1862. when the last big tranche of the sewers opened. in germany it wasn't until nearly 1890 precisely because it didn't have the sewers. so you have to start with underground. can't have a city without it. >> host: have you read steven johnson's work on the london underground? >> guest: no, i don't -- oh, on the underground. >> host: right. >> guest: yes, yes. well, also, i tried very hard to finagle a trip. they had a 150th anniversary of the underground, of the tube. and they had a steam train, and i tried very hard to finagle a trip, but that didn't work. >> host: what was the importance of the underground subway system opening? >> guest: the underground was important.

it wasn't, it was part of a whole. the development of the idea of public transport not as a private means of profit, but as a way of an entire city profiting that public transport makes life possible for everybody. there was an expression in the 19th century that for the poor you had to live near your bread which meant live near where you worked. and, of course, what public transport does is it means that isn't the case any longer, and it's a way of cleaning out the slums. you don't have to live centrally anymore. you can afford to live in a nicer area because you can afford to commute. so the 19th century saw a range of these things happening. the first was the invention of the bus. which, of course, is short for omnibus which arrived in england in 1833.

then a decade later you've got the arrival of the trains and particularly important was the government-passed regulation saying all train companies had to run what were called working men's trains which were incredibly cheap and ran at sort of 6:00 in the morning, 5:00 in the morning. and so that got the workers in and out of london and meant that they no longer had to live near their bread. so the tube was really just an extension of that. the first tube opened in 1863. and when americans come to london and say why don't you have air-conditioning on your tubes, why don't you have wi-fi, why don't you -- how come they're all upstairs? i mean, i'm old, i can't do stairs, the answers are because they were built in 1863. >> host: is it only the americans who make those complaints? >> guest: the stairs everyone complains about. wi-fi -- the french complain about the wi-fi too.

but i think only the americans complain about the air-conditioning, yes. [laughter] >> host: and we're talking with author judith flanders about some of her books. and as we mentioned earlier, she has written a book called "the invention of murder." >> guest: she has. >> host: that came out in 2011. >> guest: yes. >> host: and what is that book about? >> guest: one of the things i became fascinated by as i was doing a completely different book was how the victorians took real-life murder cases and turned them into popular entertainment. i'd known about a few of them, for instance, in tickens' bleak -- dickens' bleak house there is a murder, and i knew that the murder rest was based on a real-life murder, the real life woman was a woman named mariah manning, and she and her husband murdered her lover and buried him under the kitchen floor the way you do. and i knew dickens had taken this and turned it into fiction.

and in willkie collins, the moonstone, i knew there was a case that -- i sort of had it in the back of my mind without really knowing anything about it that he had used the basis for what is known as the first-ever detective story. so i became very interested in this idea. and what i realized was that, of course, if you look at it soberly, it's no different than we do. it's just that we put them on television and in the movies, you know? we take the boston strangler or whatever and make a television program. they would make fiction, they would make novels or plays or, i discovered, puppet shows. there was one famous case, a woman named mariah martin was murdered by her lover and buried under the floor in a barn in a place in suffolk which

traditionally the barns are all painted red. so she was -- the case is known as mariah martin and the red barn. and there's a puppet show about it. it was so successful it lasted, oh, i tracked it through the 1890s, and she died in 1823, i think. and the most amazing thing i discovered was that they named racehorses for murderers. and there were, i think, at least two or three racehorses named jack the ripper that were running while the murders were still going on. can you imagine going to race course, and jack the ripper's coming up on the outside. but they did it. >> host: judith flanders, you've referred to charles dickens as a streetwalker earlier, but speaking of streetwalkers, what's your book "sharp

practice" about? >> guest: your researcher dug up a dead book. >> host: a dead book? [laughter] >> guest: it was a book i was going to write but then didn't. >> host: about margaret caroline rudd. >> guest: i long to write about mrs. rudd, but i had just started to do some research, and i was having a wonderful time. mrs. rudd was an 18th century forger, and the mail arrived one day, and so i opened it up. and i get a lot of books sent to me by publishers because i review as well. and out popped this book about mrs. rudd. and it was so weird. i looked at it and thought, is this a joke? is my agent playing a joke on me? has he, you know, with his computer mocked something up? and i realized, no, somebody else had done it. and we talked, my publisher, and we decided there just wasn't space in the world for two books about an unknown 18th century

forger within two or three years. so i had to drop it. but i'd like to do it. i'd like to do it again one day. she had balls. i liked her. [laughter] >> host: judith flanders, where are you from? >> guest: i'm from montreal. >> host: why do you live in london? >> guest: i'm not really sure. i ended up here, i think is the answer. i was born here. my mother is english. so when i finished university, i went to skidmore in upstate new york. i came here to see what would happen. i had family here. and i seem to have forgotten to leave. >> host: you spent a year in israelsome. >> guest: i spent a year in israel. my parents were there for a while, so i went. but that didn't really work out for me. but good researcher. >> host: what are you working on currently? >> guest: i'm working on a book

about the idea of home. english is one of the very few languages in the world that has two separate worlds, one for house and one for home. so we don't think willing an idea of home -- having an idea of home, sort of a nostalgic, warm idea about what that means sod, but it is his -- is odd, but it's historically odd. it's entirely a post-16th, 17th century idea. a whole emotional involvement with the place we live. it comes from a very, very small part of the world. it comes from that northwest crescent of europe, sort of from germany, scandinavian countries down to the netherlands, kind of across to us. of course, you inherited it with the puritans. but we all know exactly what we

mean by home. it's never occurred to us that people in the 10th or 12th centuries might not. but if you look specifically at european languages, only that northwest european crescent have two words. everyone else just has one. yeah, the french don't know how to say home. so i'm trying to work out why we think differently about that. >> host: you write regular reviews as well. >> guest: i do. >> host: what do you review, where do you write it? >> guest: i review books for several of the dailies or sunday papers here, and i review for "the wall street journal" in the states. i do, i review contemporary art and dance for the times literary

supplement. and basically anyone else who asks me. not proud. >> host: and this is booktv on c-span2. we have been talking with judith flanders. "circle of sisters" is one of her books. "the invention of murder" is another and then a couple about victorian life. the names of those books -- >> guest: well, "the invention of murder" is going to be published in the states in june, i think, maybe july. i'm not quite sure. >> host: of 2013. >> guest: of 2013. what in britain is called "the victorian house" is in america called "inside the victorian home," and you see they have a separate word which is what started me thinking it. and "the victorian city" will be published soon, probably a year after "murder," -- >> just in the states.

>>ing it's been published here. >> host: judith flanders.c o.u.k. this is booktv on c-span2. >> for more information on these and other interviews from london, visit booktv.org. and watch booktv every sunday at 6 p.m. over the next several weeks for more. >> you're watching booktv on c-span2. here's our prime time lineup for tonight. up next an event from the recent 2013 gaithers burg book festival with lynne olson, author of "those angry days: roosevelt, lindbergh and america's tight over world world war ii." then at 8 p.m. we hear from jonathan lyons, "the society for useful knowledge: how benjamin franklin and friends brought enlightenment to america." at 9 p.m. on "after words,"

barbara perry details the life of rose kennedy. following that at 10 p.m., eastern, a presentation of "nothing but blue skies." by author edward mcclelland. and we conclude tonight's prime time programming at 11 p.m. eastern with a discussion about the tate of afghanistan. that all happens next -- the state of afghanistan. that all happens next on c-span2's booktv. >> up next, lynne olson presents her most recent book, "those angry days: roosevelt, lindbergh and america's fight over world war ii," at the 2013 gaithers burg book festival. this is about 50 minutes. >> olson has been a reporter and writer since shortly afterbo graduating from the university of arizona.over she was seven years with the

associated press working as a national feature writer in new york, a foreign correspondent in ap's moscow bureau and a t political reporter in washington. she left the associated press to join the washington bower row of the baltimore sun -- bureau of the baltimore sun where she covered national politics and eventually the white house. she later taught journalingismn for five years at american university in washington. lynne olson has written sixjour books of history including the national bestseller "citizens of london" which is also on sale at the politics & prose tent. her latest book, which i've jusn finished, is just terrific. "those angry days: roosevelt,he lindbergh and america's fighti for world world war ii, 1939-19" tells the story of the no-holds-barred debate that raged in the united states over what role our nation should play inho the second world war. in hindsight, we remember world war ii as a time of extraordinary national groupty when our country came together to fight the last good war

against the unquestionable evil of naziism and the imperial of japan. but ms. olson makes it clear thp decision to enter the war was ferociously controversial.t th the president roosevelt we remember from history, a bold, decisive leader, is not seen in this book.ly instead, roosevelt is portrayed as an extremely cautious politician afraid to get aheadar of public opinion. olson writes: the people wanted fdr to lead them while he seemed to expect them to lead him. the result was stasis. roosevelt and winston churchill, as one might expect, are por be. trayed vividly in the book, but the other dominant figure is tho famous aviator and really oddth dude -e - [laughter] charles lindbergh. revered as an american hero forf his solo flight across the atlantic in 1927, later reviled

as a nazi sympathizer for his prominent role in the america first movement which opposed u.s. entry into the war. lindbergh, we learn through thio book, maintained a deeplythe strange ideology, was averse too his own celebrity and led a scandalous secret life. another fascinating character is wendell willkie, the dark horse presidential candidate whose charisma swept him to the republican presidential nomination in 1940 even though, his liberalism and internationalism made him ante w outlier in the party. after losing to roosevelt, he became one of roosevelt's greatest allies in the public debate about u.s. involvement in the war. the christian science monitor review of "those angry days" called it an absorbing chronicle. olson doesn't so much revisit an historical period as inhabit iti her scenes flicker as urgently as a newsreel.or while highlighting lindbergh and fdr as its stars, "those angry

days" embraces a cast of characters far beyond the book's titledr character. please join me in welcoming theo author, lynne olson. [applause] b >> thank you. thank you all for being here. thank you, george, for that absolutely wonderful introduction. this is a really sec tack lahr event -- spectacular event, and i'm very, very pleased to have been asked to participate. i'd like to give a big shout out to the city of gaithersburg for putting this on.have it's, it's so incrediblyike heartening for an author to have an event like this. i'd also like to pay tribute to the montgomery county council for its incredible support of the arts and the curlture t community in the -- cultural community in the county. i know all in this because my apparently, jenny cloud, works for the partnership. and she's told me a number of times about how much the councin and you, george, have done, what you've done to maintain fundingd

for arts organizations like hers. it's really important, and so thank you very much. i'd like to start out today by reading a quotation from winston churchill. which is, you can always count on the americans to do the right thing after they've triedin everything else. [laughter] it's a wonderfully funny line, typically churchillian, butth there are a lot of emotions behind it; exasperation, angerit and bitterness among them. .. a wonderfully funny line, and exasperation, anger and bitterness. churchill clearly felt those emotions in the desperate days of 1940-1941, when we the last ones in europe standing against him but the british had been bombed night after night by the