In the 1880s, a generation after the gold rushes, Melbourne rose to become Australia's most populous, modern and self-consciously 'metropolitan' city. Its offices and warehouses leapt skyward, its suburbs sprawled and the tentacles of its commerce reached across the continent.

In the 1890s, the housing boom burst, depression struck and Melbourne's population and influence declined. In this classic work of Australian social history, Graeme Davison explores the economic, political, social and cultural consequences of the meteoric rise, and calamitous fall, of the city dubbed ‘Marvellous Melbourne'.