victorian cities: how modern?

Journal of Historical Geography, 1, 2 (1975) 135-151

Victorian cities: How modem?

David Ward

During the past decadetil great interest has been expressed in the retrospective application of many of the generalisations and methods of the contemporary social sciences to the formidable body of statistical data on the residents of nineteenth-century cities. ~1 This methodological development has not been restricted to studies of the recent past but prior to the nineteenth century, limitations of statistical data frequently have presented insurmountable problems. Moreover, many of the assumptions and some of the determinative conditions of generalisations about contemporary society require rather careful modification if they are to remain valuable in their retrospective applications. This methodological dis- cretion may perhaps appear to be less compelling to students of nineteenth century society for so many aspects of our own “modern” society were already well established in that century. Nevertheless, the terms “nineteenth-century” and more especially “Victorian” have been used to describe attributes peculiar to the last century and which stand in stark contrast to those of not only preceding centuries but also our own.tsJ In contrast, the use of generalisations of the contemporary social sciences in the examinations of Victorian society assumes that in most substantial respects Victorian society was “modern”. Consequently, at a time when methodological experiment and innovation are greatly invigorating studies of Victorian cities, it does seem essential to establish more precisely the continuities and discontinuities between life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century cities.

One aspect of this question of the “modernity” of nineteenth-century cities that has attracted the attention of several disciplines is the ancestry and longevity of the highly differentiated social and residential patterns of modern cities.[41 The modern western city displays a mosaic of residential districts, usually well sepa- rated from major sources of employment and distinguished from one another by differences in the status, income, family size, life style and the racial, religious or ethnic identities of their residents. These social areas are not always well defined

[l] Many of the ideas of this paper were germinated while the author was the grateful recipient of a Fellowship granted by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

[2] S. Thernstrom and R. Sennett (Eds), Nineteenth-century cities: Essays in the new urban

131

[41

history (New Haven 1969); E. A. Wrigley (Ed.) The S&y of ninete>nth century society (Cambridge 1972) W. E. Houghton, The Victorian frame of mind, 1830-1870 (New Haven and London 1957); H. J. Dyos and M. Wolff, The way we live now pp. 893407 of H. J. Dyos and M. Wolff (Eds), The Victorian city: Images and reality 2 (London 1973) E.g. : A. Hawley, Urban society: An ecological approach (New York 1971); B. T. Robson, Urban analysis: A study of city structure with special reference to Sunderland (Cambridge 1969); P. G. Goheen, Victorian Toronto, 1850-1900: Pattern andprocess of growth (Chicago 1970); S. B. Warner, Jr, The private city: Philadelphia in three periods of its growth (Philadelphia 1968)

136 D. WARD

either on the ground or in the minds of urban residents who may perceive and judge the same or similar districts in a variety of fashions. In spite of these problems of definition, regularities have been recognised in the spatial arrangements of the different attributes of urban residents. The precise geometric arrangements of these attributes are perhaps of less importance than the recognition or assumption of a relationship between the diverse bases of stratification within urban society and the differentiated social geography of the city.[ll

Overlapping zonal, sectoral, clustered and random arrangements of different urban social traits for long have been assumed to be diagnostic of “modern” or “industrial” cities and some of these patterns were first recognised in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Specifically, Booth in his monumental survey of London in the late nineteenth century and Burgess in his contribution to the volume of essays which largely defined the Chicago school of urban ecology, proposed a zonal arrangement of socio-economic groups with the most prosperous in the outermost zones.[zl Since 1920 and especially since World War 11, changes in the processes of urban growth not only may have rendered these original zonal models obsolete but also may demand a re-evaluation of the assumed relationships between social stratification and social areas. Webber, in particular, has explored the diminishing effects of propinquity in urban behaviour and today social areas defined by status, income or educational variables may reveal very little about the behaviour of their residents.[31 One aspect of what increasingly is referred to as our post-industrial society is the development of new behavioural bases of social stratification with spatial implications that are only vaguely discerned.[41 Under these circumstances, the original formulations of urban residential differentiation well may be more representative of late nineteenth than of late twentieth century urban life. Indeed, as Harvey has recently re-emphasised, Engels had recognised in Manchester as early as 1844, a zonal arrangement of social groups apparently similar to that described by Burgess for early twentieth-century Chicago.[sl There are both minor differences of detail between the social geographic patterns observed in the two cities and major differences in the processes invoked by the observers to explain the broadly similar spatial arrangements of social groups. Nevertheless, the underlying notion of the emphatic residential segregation of social groups, with the poor condemned to congested and old housing in the inner city and the affluent established in new houses in spacious suburbs, is common to both descriptions.

These striking similarities in the social geographies of Manchester and Chicago, two of the most representative cities of the early nineteenth and early twentieth

[l] D. W. G. Timms, The urban mosaic, towards a theory of residential difirentiution (Cambridge 1971) 140

[2] H.W. Pfautz (Ed.), ChurlesBoothonthecity:Physiculputternundsociulstructure(Chicago 1967) 90-l ; E. W. Burgess, The growth of the city, pp. 47-62 of R. E Park (Ed.), The city (Chicago 1925)

[3] M. M. Webber, The urban place and the nonplace urban realm pp. 108-14 in M. M. Webber (Ed.), Explorations into urban structure (Philadelphia 1964); R. Palm, Factorial ecology and the community of outlook Annals of the Association of American Geographers 63 (1973) 341-46

[4] D. Bell, The coming of post-industrial society: A venture in social forecasting (New York 1973); B. J. L. Berry, The human consequences of urbanization (London 1973)

[5] F. Engels, l%he condition of the working class in England trans. by W. 0. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (London 1958) 30-87; D. Harvey, Social justice and the city (Baltimore 1973) 131-3

VICTORIAN CITIES 137

centuries, well might suggest that the retrospective application of the long established generalisations of contemporary urban ecology and geography may present fewer methodological problems than the continued use of these models in the post- industrial society of the second half of the twentieth century. In short, the social geographic changes in British and North American cities during the nineteenth century may perhaps be viewed as similar in form and direction if not in scale to those of the first half of the twentieth century and, consequently, the use of the appellations “Victorian” or “nineteenth century” as generic terms may obscure the essential continuity of the processes of residential and social differentiation in “modern” or “industrial” cities.[il Certainly, cities which grew from extremely diminutive beginnings or were established “de novo” in newly settled areas presumably exhibited modern residential and social patterns from their inception. But almost all rapidly growing Victorian cities were new and even to contemporaries were synonymous with all that was “industrial” and “modern”.

There is, however, some evidence which suggests that both the kind and level of residential and social differentiation in those cities which had attained a substantial size by the early and mid nineteenth century were somewhat different than those displayed by the same cities at the turn of the century. Certainly the complexity and proportionate distribution of people within the different strata of income and status groups changed quite markedly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the middle ranges of society increased in size and the lower ranges decreased. Both Booth and Burgess describe a society with several socio-economic layers but Engels, two generations earlier, found two antagonistic classes sufficient. Quite apart from the fact that there were too few affluent people in Manchester of 1844 to encircle completely the vast majority of less prosperous people, it is clear that if we are to relate the simple social geographic pattern en- visaged by Engels to the more complex arrangements at the turn of the century, we need to know much more about the degree of residential sorting, if any, amongst the less prosperous majority. Most early Victorian cities displayed great ,extremes of wealth and destitution in their social geographic patterns but districts occupied exclusively by the affluent did not monopolise the suburban fringe of the city for sometimes concentrations of poverty-stricken people were found there in shanty-towns or hastily built cottage property. Moreover, the social identification, material living conditions and residential patterns of people between these two extremes of wealth were not only difficult to identify on the ground but also a source of debate and confusion to many of Engels’ contemporaries.[*l

Recent research on mid nineteenth-century northeastern American cities has revealed relatively weak levels of residential differentiation and a rather high degree of interspersal of both occupational and ethnic groups.[31 Since native-born residents and Irish and German immigrants tended to dominate different occupational groups which recorded considerable differences in income and status, the process of ethnic group clustering so characteristic of the late nineteenth

[l] P. G. Goheen, Interpreting the American city: Some historical perspectives Geographical Review 64 (1974) 263-84

[2] M. G. Himmelfarb, Mayhew’s Poor: A problem of identity Victorian Studies 14 (1971) 308-20; R. S. Neale, Class and class consciousness in early nineteenth century England: Three classes or Five? Victorian Studies 12 (1968) 4-32

[3] S. B. Warner, Jr, op. cit. 49-78; D. Ward, The internal spatial differentiation of immigrant residential districts in the nineteenth century Northwesfern University Department of Geo- graphy, Special Publication 3 (1970) 24-42

138 D. WARD

century might have been expected to have reinforced residential patterns based upon socio-economic status.[il Some residential differentiation was, of course, at an extremely small scale with blocks rather than districts as the unit of social or ethnic homgeneity, but overall, even in cities where both ethnicity and socio- economic status were bases of social differentiation, the patterns of residential differentiation were surprisingly weakly developed until after the Civil War. For these reasons it is suggested that it may still be a matter of debate as to which geographic aspects of modern urban society were fully established, partly developed or totally absent from early and mid nineteenth-century cities.

Some im@ications of ltistorical typologies

Although the pre nineteenth-century dimensions of many modern industrial cities were extremely small, it is possible that some residential patterns long established prior to the industrial revolution persisted and grew within the emerging modern arrangements of people and activities. Weak levels or small scale patterns of residential differentiation may indeed record the “transitional” character of nineteenth-century society for the ambiguous spatial configuration of social groups contrasted not only with arrangements described as “modern” but also with what have variously been described as “pre-modern”, “traditional” or “pre-industrial” social geographic patterns, ~1 Residential differentiation is not, of course, unique to modern cities for from their beginnings urban settlements have displayed in varying degree some of the complexities of their social and economic organisations in the internal arrangements of their land uses.

Historical differences in the type and degree of residential differentiation and in the arrangements of these differences on the ground have been compressed into two somewhat idealised social geographies which contrast in the most genera1 terms, conditions within cities before and after the industrial revolution, or, for that matter, between the “developed” and “less-developed” worlds.[31 Although it has long been recognised that this dichotomous classification greatly oversimpli- fies the range of urban life within each of the two “worlds”, it is also apparent that when used historically the typology provides very few insights into the processes of change and persistence from one social geography to another.[dl One of the major differences between these two ideal&d social geographic patterns is the relative locations of the wealthy and poor within cities. In “traditional” cities, central residential locations were monopolised by the most affluent and prestigious residents of the city with the poor most frequently living on the edge

[I] D. Ward, Some locational attributes of the ethnic division of labour in mid-nineteenth century american cities Proceedings of the Conference on the National Archives and Historical Geography (Washington D C in press)

[2] G. Sjoberg, 77ze pre-industrial city (Glencoe, Ill. 1960) l-24, 91-107; R. N. Morris, Urban sociology (London 1968) 39-61

[3] L. F. Schnore, On the spatial structure of cities in the two americas, pp. 347-98 of P. F. Hauser and L. F. Schnore (Eds), The study of urbanization (Chicago 1965); G. Sjoberg, Cities in developing and industrial societies, pp. 213-63 of P. F. Hauser and L. F. Schnore (Eds), op. cit.; D. W. G. Timms, op. cit. 220-3

[4] P. Wheatley, What the greatness of the city is said to be Pacific Viewpoint 4 (1963) 163-88; L. Reissman, The urban process: Cities in industrial societies (New York, 1964) 150-238; E. E. Lampard, Historical aspects of urbanization, pp. 519-541 of P. F. Hauser and L. F. Schnore (Eds), op. cit. R. J. Johnston, Towards a general model of intra-urban residential patterns: Some cross-cultural observations Progress in Geography 4 (1972) 83-124


of the city. Intermediate social groups occupied intervening locations which were frequently marked by clusters of craft occupations where the same premises served as workshop and residence and where, to a certain degree, there was some vertical sorting by status in multi-storey structures. This arrangement of social groups was almost exactly the opposite of that described by Engels and by Booth and Burgess for modern cities.

Although rarely precisely or explicitly stated, this reversal of the relative posi- tions of the affluent and poor has generally been attributed to two apparently concurrent effects of the industrial revolution.[il Firstly, the growth of undesirable commercial and industrial activities in the inner city detracted from the prestigious associations and convenience of residence near to the centrally located political, economic and ecclesiastical institutions of the city. Secondly, for those who could afford to take advantage of the successive improvements in local transportation, exclusively residential suburbs presented an environment of more spaciously arranged housing isolated from the deteriorating conditions of the inner city. As large sections of the inner city were blighted by non-residential uses, upwardly mobile residents moved to suburban residences, abandoning centrally located districts to the resident poor who were joined by newly arrived immigrants in increasingly congested circumstances. As long as the most upwardly mobile families continued to obtain the newest housing in the most peripheral locations, a process of “invasion and succession” or “filtration” provided a supply of housing for less mobile or less prosperous people. Accordingly, until life-cycle changes began to influence residential mobility, households with progressively higher incomes tended to occupy each successive zone.[21 In short, the concurrent effects of the industrialisation and centralisation of urban employment and the growth of local transportation facilities so rapidly transformed or established the modern social geography of the city that any “transitional” or “emergent” phase would have been brief, ephemeral and scarcely recognisable. This kind of reasoning, however, assumes the chronological coincidence of a wide range of social geographic changes which we know to have occurred at different rates and at different times both before and during the industrial revolution. An elaboration of the timing of several such critical changes within cities before and during the industrial revolution may yield some insights into the weakly defined and possibly “transitional” properties of early and mid nineteenth-century cities.[jl

Modemisation before the Industrial Revolution

The outward movement of affluent merchants and the aristocratic elite from central urban locations where their former residences were converted to or re- placed by specialised business premises began in many mercantile cities in the seventeenth century if not earlier.t41 By the eighteenth century the demands of particularly port or capital cities for unskilled labour supported concentrations

[l] L. Mumford, The city in history, (New York 1961) 458-65; 482-513; R. E. Pahl, Patterns ofurban life (London 1970) 41; D. W. G. Timms, op. cit. 127-33; R. N. Morris, op. cit. 101-9

[2] D. W. G. Timms, op. cit. 145-S [3] Cf: G. Sjoberg, “Cities”, op. cit. 224 [4] J. E. Vance, Jr, Land assignment in the precapitalist, capitalist and postcapitalist city

Economic Geography 47 (1971) 1 lo-12

140 D. WARD

of poor people who, although collectively described as a “crowd” rather than as a “lower class”, nevertheless revealed a growing awareness of the threatening implications of the isolation and segregation of the poor.[lJ During the two or three centuries preceding the industrial revolution, urban land became an item of commerce and, like the staple cargoes of merchant vessels, sensitive to the laws of supply and demand.[zl

Long ago Max Weber recognised the institutional debt of “industrial capi- talism” not only to the mercantile capitalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but also to the merchants of mediaeval European cities.r-il Weber considered these institutional and related social changes to be beginnings of a process of “modernisation” which was accelerated rather than initiated by industrialisation. For these reasons he clearly distinguished between urban settlements based upon markets and dominated by merchants from the redistributive centres of the religiously sanctioned dynasties, autocracies or bureaucracies of Oriental Civili- sations. The mercantile city was a centre of social and economic changes which spread, not always without conflict, to the more traditional rural society whereas the cities of the Orient were centres of regional dynastic or autocratic power and, as repositories of the values and institutions of the traditional world, provided few if any opportunities for the stirrings of modernisation. Indeed, it was because Weber viewed urbanisation and modernisation as concurrent and related processes that he described Oriental cities with their traditional social orders as overgrown villages.

Clearly this distinction of mercantile and traditional cities simplifies a wide range of both regional and historical variations with which Weber was fully familiar. Within the most precocious of mediaeval European cities, traditional social patterns persisted alongside new institutions and it was not until the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries that rent yield rather than customary use or social obligation began to influence the assignment of urban land uses and encouraged the utilisation of increasingly valuable central urban locations for more specialised commercial activities rather than for a mixture of residential and commercia1 uses.t41 These specialised central urban land uses were for long of extremely small dimensions, but the early emergence of banking and warehouse quarters in mercantile cities indicated the beginnings of the process of land-use differentiation which, once accelerated by the effects of industrialisation, culminated in the modern central business district. The residential additions of the wealthy were rarely extensive and, during the course of the nineteenth century, their once peripheral locations were enveloped by more suburban additions or displaced by business activities. Wherever seventeenth- and eighteenth-century precincts have survived, their urbane styles and historical associations frequently mask their once suburban role.

These tentative observations have been well documented only in London and before any definitive chronology of the social geographic changes within mercantile cities in general may be offered, far more research is needed on the provincial cities of the Atlantic economy in the centuries before the industrial

[l] G. Rude, The crowd in history (New York 1964) 47-78; L. Kronenberger, Kings and des- perate men, life in eighteenth century England (New York 1942) 90-8

[2] J. E. Vance, Jr, op. cit. 107-11; D. Harvey, op. cit. 260-l ; K. Polanyi, The greaf trans- formation (Boston 1957) 5676

[3] Max Weber, The city trans. by D. Martindale (New York 1962) 97-209 [4] J. E. Vance, Jr, op. cit. 107-11 ; D. Harvey, op. cit. 260-I


revolution.[il Certainly, recent research on the dominantly rural society of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has revealed that many attributes of a truly traditional society, and especially the extended family and high levels of residential persistence, were no longer prevalent.[*l These findings prompted Wrigley’s observation that some social changes attributed to industrialisation and which in the north of England did not occur until the nineteenth century, were apparent not only in seventeenth-century London but also in surrounding areas. Long before the industrial revolution, London was a centre from which social changes most appropriately described as modernisation diffused.[sl Patten’s broad survey of the rural-urban movement in pre-industrial England does as a whole suggest that some sections of provincial England also may have experienced on a smaller scale the modernising processes related to the metropolis alone.t41 Under these circumstances, the question about the modernity of the Victorian City might be more fruitfully addressed to the social geographic changes of the mercantile cities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but of all the manifestations of modernisation prior to the industrial revolution, the changes in the internal arrangement of social groups and activities in mercantile cities may be among the least impressive. The affluent were after all a tiny minority of the populations of mercantile cities and occupation rather than socio-economic status continued to define the residential quarters of the less prosperous. Similarly, the small area of specialised commercial land uses were surrounded by extensive sections where residence and employment were intermixed. Indeed, districts devoted to the small scale workshop production of particular commodities and housing the diverse labour forces of intricately divided production processes persisted as a conspicuous feature of nineteenth- century cities.

The persistence of craft-workshop quarters

Districts, and certainly streets, devoted to the residences and work places of well defined craft occupational groups were a marked feature of traditional and mercantile cities. The persistence of some of these craft quarters in those nineteenth- century cities that had attained a substantial commercial prosperity before the industrial revolution was to be expected, but not the emergence of similar districts in cities whose main growth occurred during the course of industrialisation.

In all but the most specialised manufacturing centres, factories employed a minority of the total labour force and even within the manufacturing sector, industries such as clothing, footwear, printing, woodworking, and metalworking were organised on an extremely small scale and were often clustered in centrally located areas which also housed mercantile agents, master craftsmen, journeymen, and labourers in close proximity.tsl In so far as these workshop quarters represented an inheritance of an older system of industrial organisation, they did not

[l] Esp.: J. Summerson, GeorgianLondon (London 1962) 17-64; M. D. George, London life in the eighteenth century (New York 1965); F. J. Fisher, The development of London as a centre of conspicuous consumption in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th Ser. 30 (1948) 37-50

[2] P. Laslett, The world we have lost (London 1965) [3] E. A. Wrigley, The process of modernisation and industrialization in England Journal of

Interdisciplinary History 3 (1972) 225-59 [4] J. Patten, Rural-urban migration in pre-industrial England School of Geography, University

of Oxford, Research Papers 6 (1973) 45-9 [5] E. P. Thompson, The making of the English working class (London 1968) 259-96

142 D. WARD

contribute to the weakly defined social geography of early nineteenth-century cities but rather represented the survival of a long established and quite emphatic older basis of residential differentiation. In spite of some quite striking continuities in the scale and location of workshop industries, there were several organisational changes in many craft-based activities which greatly confused the clarity of both their structure and spatial definition. By sub-contracting and “putting-out” many unskilled segments of a production process once accomplished in its entirety by a master craftsman and by the mechanisation of small segments of both skilled and unskilled processes, small-scale units of production with an intricate division of work tasks multiplied and expanded to such a degree that a considerable interspersal and overlapping of the distributions of different workshop industries occurred.til These workshop trades were so prevalent throughout the nineteenth century that Marshall did not regard small-scale enterprise as a diminishing relict of the pre-industrial world but attempted to define economies based upon “agglomeration” or “externalities” as well as considerations of scale.Ql In the absence of innovations suitable for large-scale mechanisation or in the face of highly elastic and unpredictable markets, small scale enterprises derived advantages from their agglomeration and the presence in their vicinity of specialised services which individual firms themselves could not afford. In short, for many industries industrialisation was limited and scale economies irrelevant, but their persistence was to classical economists not a matter of inertia but perfectly consistent with the working of the market economy.

The once guild-regulated crafts with their well defined status hierarchy both within and between occupations were gradually converted into what came to be described as “sweated trades” in which the independence and dignity of the artisan was eroded by the decomposition of the production process in order to engage unskilled or less skilled labour.r31 In spite of this well documented degra- dation of the urban artisan which tended to reduce the range of social differentiation within these localities, distinctions of status endured or were re-defined so that the central workshop quarters were less emphatically differentiated by industry but continued to house populations of diverse socio-economic standing. Although modernisation and industrialisation did not alter the relative location of workshop industries within the city until the turn of the nineteenth century, the changes in industrial organisation did destroy the old basis of residentia1 differentiation and in the absence of clear separation of home and work and the persistence of status and presumably of income differentials within the workshop labour force, residential differentiation must have been very weak.141

Moreover, it was largely the continued and expanding presence of workshop industries in central urban locations that confined the central concentrations of exclusively destitute people to those areas which for long had remained unde- veloped because of poor site properties. Very few early nineteenth-century cities had exhausted the supply of land within easy access to the central sections of the

[l] P. G. Hall, The industries of London since 1861 (London 1962) 37-120; D. Ward, Cities and immigrants: A geography of change in nineteenth century America (New York 1971) 85-104

[2] A. Marshall, PrincipIes of economics 8th ed. (London 1920) 271 [3] E. P. Thompson, op. cit.; G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A study on the relationship

between classes in Victorian society (Oxford 1971) 239 [4] J. E. Vance, Jr, Housing the worker: determinative and contingent ties in nineteenth century

Birmingham Economic Geography 43 (1967) 95-127


city and the expenses of environmental engineering were initially avoided. Thus, in the early and middle years of the nineteenth century, it was the problems of drainage and site that dominated descriptions of the housing problem whereas at the turn of the century, room overcrowding and the damaging social and physio- logical effects of congestion were most frequent.L*l We know a great deal about the macabre details of the swamp-like sites upon which the destitute poor were forced to live in early Victorian cities but much less about their representativeness or location in relation to low-income residential areas as a whole.

Some implications of limited social mobility

Quite apart from the effects of the pre-emptive claims of workshop industries upon the concentration of the poor in central locations, there were substantial additions to Victorian cities which housed people with a great range of income, status and occupation. To be consistent with descriptions of a “modern” social geography, the vast physical additions to Victorian cities would presumably be clearly differentiated on the basis of socio-economic status with the more affluent and socially prominent in the most peripheral additions. The emergence of this zonal arrangement and particularly the eventual concentration of the poorest people in the oldest and most centrally located housing was, however, dependent upon a process of upward social mobility of sufficient magnitude and frequency that the abandonment of older more centrally located housing, even allowing for infilling of vacant space and higher population densities, was adequate to meet the housing needs of large numbers of immigrants who generally were seeking the cheapest housing.

This predicament is perhaps most graphically illustrated by the experience of northeastern seaports of the United States during the sixth decade of the nineteenth century when large numbers of Irish and German immigrants arrived before rates of upward social mobility or local transport facilities were able to encourage suburban growth on a scale large enough to meet the housing demands of the immigrant poor. Consequently, only a minority of the newcomers concentrated in centrally located quarters in the fashion of their successors from southern and eastern Europe later in the century. ~1 Irish and German immigrants did settle on vacant and often poorly drained land within the city and in shanty-towns on the edge of the built up area, but to a remarkable degree interspersed within the population as a whole. There was indeed a great deal of block-by-block concentration of foreign and native born but the scale and kind of residential differentiation was clearly different in scale from that described as “modern” at the turn of the century. In newer Middle Western cities there were somewhat greater concentrations of ethnic groups but here a single immigrant group frequently formed a plurality or even a majority of the population and some substantial degree of clustering was inevitable.t31 Indeed, in these cities the immigrant society was more likely to be a microcosm of urban society as a whole rather than a minority, clearly identified by its impoverishment. Largely because after the Civil

[1] W. A. Ashworth, The genesis of modern British town planning (London 1954) 47-117 [2] D. Ward, “The internal spatial structure” op. cit. 24-42 f31 K. N. Conzen, The German Athens: Milwaukee and the accommodation of its immigrants,

1846-1860 (unpubl. Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison 1972)

144 D. WARD

War successive extensions and improvements in local transportation facilities made possible the more rapid abandonment of central urban locations by a growing number of socially mobile people, the pre-streetcar residential pattern of those few North American cities that were of any size at mid-century was extremely short lived.

Many British industrial cities experienced their most rapid growth in population and employment in the first half of the nineteenth century when the facilities for local transportation were extremely poorly developed. To be sure both the steam railroad and the horse omnibus services were introduced towards the end of this period, but they served an extremely limited number of affluent commuters, most of whom tended to settle in and around small neighbouring villages well removed from the physical limits of the industrial city itself.ril Under these circumstances, the process of invasion and succession by which the housing stock “filtered” downwards was most unlikely, for the rate at which the upwardly mobile moved to new housing could not have supplied the needs of the less properous. Most low- income people lived in housing that was built as cottage property specifically to rent at levels which the poor could afford, and it was because housing was jerry built to serve low incomes that instant slums were created.rzl However, Alonso has argued that in rapidly growing cities where “filtration” is of little consequence market processes would still lead to the development of a zonal arrangement of residential areas with the rich seeking spacious lots in the most peripheral locations.r31 In short, zonal residential patterns may be imposed by market processes without the necessity of several generations of “filtration.” Apart from the precincts of the very rich which were either on a few attractive sites on the edge of the city or around nearby villages, certainly not a zone encircling the entire city, most peripheral additions to early Victorian cities comprised an intermixture of factories and cottage properties.r4J

Although some employers provided housing for their labour force in the vicinity of their new factories, most new dwellings were quickly and cheaply built by large numbers of petty builders, many of whom lived in their own creations. The residents of these expanding acres of small, generally two- or three-roomed terraced cottages were not confined to local factory workers, for the most striking feature of these piece-meal developments was the occupational diversity of their residents. This diversity was compounded by the range of occupations within individual households, for local factories provided employment either for adult males in the case of heavy industries or for adolescents and single females in the case of textiles.[sl Other members of the household sought work elsewhere but largely because of the high density of newly constructed housing, the dimensions of most cities remained small enough to enable most workers to reach employment almost anywhere in the city. To the extent that the residents of these growing acres of cottage property sought and obtained employment as close as possible to

[l] J. R. Kellett, The impact of Railways on Victorian cities (London 1969) 337-82 [2] Several articles in S. D. Chapman (Ed.), The history of working class housing: A symposium

(Newton Abbot 1971) [3] W. A. Alonso, The historic and the structural theories of urban form: Their limitations and

urban renewal Land Economics 40 (1964) 227-3 1 [4] A. Briggs, Victorian cities (London 1963) 28 [5] N. J. Smelser, Social change in the Industrial Revolution: An application of theory to the

British cotton industry, 1770-1840 (Chicago 1959) 180-312; and S. Pollard, The genesis of modern management (London 1965) 160-208


their residences, the outward growth of the city might be more properly described as cellular rather than zonal.[ll

Warnes has recently documented some of these observations in a recent study of Chorley, Lancashire in 1851.[21 Individual occupations were not the most impor- tant determinants of residential differentiation but rather generalised groupings of occupations as new employment categories were superimposed upon the traditional range of craft activities. The geographic patterns of these generalised occupational groupings were only weakly defined and measures of socio-economic status, ethnicity and family status were evenly distributed through the town. The affluent alone formed a clearly defined social area and in Chorley in 1851 this quarter remained close to the city centre. Empirical investigations of the changing social geography of nineteenth-century towns and cities remain sparse and consequently we have little basis to judge the effects of population size, employment structure and regional location upon the conclusions derived from case studies. Nevertheless, it is likely that only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century did socially mobile people move in substantial numbers to exclusively residential additions to the city which catered to the needs of both the lower middle class and eventually to the more securely employed levels of the working class.[31 Con- sequently, it is suggested that apart from the exclusive precincts of the wealthy and socially prominent, and highly localised concentrations of the poverty-stricken, most new sections of early and mid nineteenth-century industrial cities housed people of diverse occupations which recorded limited but significant differences in remuneration and status.

Class consciousness and residential differentiation

It might, of course, be argued that the differences in wage levels and rank were too slight to be of any significance in residential choice and that in spite of their occupational diversity most less affluent residential quarters could be grouped in the general category “working-class”. Indeed, the merging of different workshop industries and the decomposition of many artisan trades may be viewed as a process which simply diminished. the distinction of skilled and unskilled occupational groups into a more generalised “working class”.tJl

The description of the social geography of early and mid nineteenth-century cities as weakly differentiated may thus be based upon a misconception of the overall class interest, perhaps even class consciousness, of varied occupations. Cer- tainly, Engels had a broad twofold division of society in mind, for the emphatic social and spatial segregation of the poor and rich into two classes was to him far more impressive than the subtle variations in income and status within each class.[sl Engels was not of course alone or original in his view of early Victorian urban society for somewhat earlier Chalmers complained of the increasing separation and isolation of the rich and the poor, and somewhat later Disraeli viewed

[l] A. Hawley, op. cit. 88-91; and J. E. Vance, Jr, Housing the worker: The employment linkage as a force in urban structure Economic Geography 42 (1966) 294-325

I21 A. M. Warnes, Residential patterns in an emerging industrial town Institute of British Geographers Special Publication 5 (1973) 169-90

E31 G. Stedman Jones, op. cit. 322-28; D. Ward, A comparative historical geography of streetcar suburbs in Boston, Massachusetts, and Leeds, England: 1850-1920 Annals of the Association of American Geographers 54 (1964) 447-89

[4] E. P. Thompson, op. cit. 887-915 [5] F. Engels, op. cit. 30-87

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English society as “two nations” of rich and poor between whom there was scarcely any contact.til These observers and many others considered the spatial separation of the rich as a threat to the stability of society in the new industrial towns for antagonism was encouraged by a growing mutual ignorance of class by class, whereas in older cities the paternalism of the rich and the deferential de- pendence of the poor was made possible by the smaller size and less segregated social geography of the city. ~1 Under these circumstances, charitable reactions to the apparently socially damaging effects of residential segregation were visitation schemes and settlement houses. These procedures were designed in part to elevate the poor by example and by contact, until eventually it became apparent that poverty was a serious structural problem requiring at least some public inter- vention.r31

Not all contemporary observers made the same inferences about social conditions and social geographic patterns, for it was also argued that in provincial industrial cities, unlike London where the poor may never see affluent homes and where the rich could contrive to avoid scenes of poverty, the interpenetration or at least immediate propinquity of wealth and poverty revealed the glaring differences in living conditions.[41 In short, the visibility of wealth and not the lack of the apparently civilising influences of the affluent aroused class hostility. These contemporary viewpoints, based upon a wide variety of political and ideological assumptions, perceived early and mid-Victorian cities as societies divided into two classes and frequently related consequences of this dichotomous stratification to the arrangement of the two social groups on the ground but there was no unan- imity about the inferences that were drawn from a segregated social geographic arrangement. Certainly we need to establish the bases of social stratification more carefully before joining so many contemporary observers in their confused inferences about the relationship between social conditions and segregated social geographic arrangements.

Quite apart from these problems of relating spatial arrangements to social conditions it is clear that the timing and kind of social geographic changes within Victorian cities were only incompletely described by many contemporary observers. Mid-Victorians viewed their age as one of transition but the past they perceived themselves to have outgrown was not the eighteenth century, but rather the Middle Ages.rsl Under these circumstances, their often idealised retrospective viewpoints of earlier urban social conditions rarely distinguished between the remote and recent past so that some changes that well may have occurred in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries were viewed as being of quite recent origin. For example, the separation of the afhuent and socially prestigious minority from the less prosperous but weakly sorted majority clearly had started long before the industrial revolution and the poor well may have been deprived of the assumed benefits of paternalism for some time. Also the most remarkable geographical change within nineteenth-century urban society was the increasing

[I] T. Chalmers, The Christian and civic economy of large towns (London, 1821) 26-9; B. Disraeli, SybiZ (London 1845)

[Z] E.g. J. Hole, The homes of the working class with suggestions for their improvement (London (1866); M. B. Simey, Charitable effort in Liverpool in the nineteenth century (Liverpool 19.51) 6, 23

[3] G. Stedman Jones, op. cit. 261-313 [4] T. H. S. Escott, England: Her people, parity and purszdts (London 1880) 143-4 [5] W. Houghton, op. cit. 1


division of the less properous majority into several strata each occupying a dis- tinct section of the city. The separation of the affluent from the remainder of society which so preoccupied contemporary observers may in retrospect be of less moment than the changes in the way in which the less properous were themselves arranged on the ground.

In early Victorian cities, however, the sense of “class consciousness” on the part of a wide range of occupational and status groups may have been greater than was true later in the century and common class interests well may have inhibited any tendency for different social groups within the lower social strata to establish separate quarters. For example, Foster has argued that in early nineteenth- century Oldham not only residential patterns but also intermarriage patterns and political behaviour supported a sense of class identity amongst factory workers, craftsmen and small shopkeepers.111 Elsewhere, where the ownership of the means of production was more dispersed and where the persistence of craft industries preserved the traditional distinctions of rank, class consciousness was less evident, but it is not altogether clear whether the weak levels of residential segregation of Oldham were duplicated. In those sectors of the economy or in those regions where industrialisation had only limited effects, older social distinctions based upon ascription or local tradition may have persisted so that the interspersal of people of different status recorded not their common class interests but rather the residential patterns of a society in which status did not need the reinforcement of an exclusive location. Indeed, even in many of the new industries, distinctions based on skill and seniority were quite prevalent and over-lookers and managers often lived in slightly larger houses adjacent to or interspersed with general factory hands. In short, the deeply ingrained social bases of status may have continued to make residential differentiation unnecessary.

In contrast, Thompson has emphasised that even in the craft-based industries the older distinctions of rank were of diminishing importance and a sense of class consciousness emerged which was rooted in the memory of an older society in which social differences were blunted by mutual self help.[21 Irrespective of striking local differences in the effects of the industrial revolution, Thompson viewed early Victorian society as one in which a sense of antagonism towards the impersonal forces of the market economy supported a consciousness of a common predicament amongst a wide spectrum of social and occupational groups. Clearly these assertions about the intensity and sources of class consciousness remain controversial and sustain one of the most enduring historiographic debates of nineteenth-century social history.r31 Nevertheless, neither the persistence of ascribed rank or status differences nor the emergence of a sense of class identity across a wide range of occupations would have encouraged the emergence of well defined social areas within those areas of the city housing the lower social strata.

There is, however, less controversy about social changes which occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century when both the persisting traditions of rank and status and the intensity and breadth of class consciousness declined.[41 111 J. Foster, Nineteenth century towns: A class dimension, pp. 281-99 of H. J. Dyos (Ed.),

The Study of Urban History (London 1968) [2] E. P. Thompson op. cit. 456 [3] G. Leff, History and social theory (New York 1969) 153-93; C. S. Doty (Ed.), The in-

dustrial revolution (New York 1969) 107-30 [4] A. Briggs, The Language of Class in early Nineteenth Century England, pp. 43-73 of A.

Briggs and J. Saville (Eds), Essays in Iabour history (London 1960); T. B. Bottomore, Classes in modern society (London 1965) 19-35

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Expectations were formulated in terms of minor gains in income and status rather than as a reorganisation of society as a whole and, furthermore, these expectations were expressed in the increased internal differentiation of the residential patterns of the city.[ll By 1889, Engels, who had been so confident of the increasing, almost inevitable, revolutionary class consciousness of an earlier generation, condemned the social divisions of late nineteenth-century British society as one of innumerable gradations, each recognised without question, each with its own pride but also its inborn respect for its betters and superiors.tzr The less prosperous majority was divided into smaller sub-cultures each with its own small-scale versions of success.

Discussions of the “labour aristocracy” and “working-class conservatives” of late Victorian Britain suggest that many of the new gradations were based upon new kinds of employment and it is possible that, as older bases of status dis- appeared and as income discrepancies between the skilled and unskilled diminished, the more prosperous and secure manual as well as clerical workers sought a more emphatic definition of their place in socety by moving to residential quarters housing people with similar occupations and incomes.tJl Particular districts and especially suburban additions to the city came to be associated with a specific and limited range of occupations and to use Lofland’s recent distinction, social differences increasingly were calibrated on a spatial order rather than one of ex- ternal appearance.r”l In traditional cities there were so many other marks of distinction between social groups that residential location was decidedly secondary to costume, hair style, speech, personal knowledge and other aspects of appearance in establishing an individual’s place in a society. By the end of the nineteenth century, many of these older bases of distinction had diminished and for the upwardly mobile segments of the working class, a new address with generallyrecognised social associations, provided a new but emphatic basis of their rising place in society.

In the United States similar subtle changes in social stratification have also aroused considerable debate. Most discussions have stressed the change from a society dominated by petty capitalists and small craftsmen living in settlements with a well defined sense of local community to one dominated by nationally organised oligopolistic corporations and rapidly growing industrial cities devoid of a sense of community and fragmented into a mosaic of mutually hostile native and ethnic districts.[51 Originally weak levels of residential differentiation were

[l] R. Dahrendorf, Class and class conflict in industrial society (Stanford 1959) 57-67; J. Foster, op. cit. 294

[2] F. Engels, On Britain (London 1889) 568 [3] E. J. Hobsbawm, The Labour Aristocracy in nineteenth-century Britain, pp. 321-70 of

E. J. Hobsbawm, Labouring men: Studies in the history of labour (New York 1967); H. Pelling, Popular politics and society in late Victorian Britain (London 1968) 37-61; R. McKenzie and A. Silver, Angels in marble: Working class conservatives in urban England (Chicago 1968) 240-61

[4] L. H. Lofland, A world of strangers (New York 1973) 29-91; R. Roberts, The classic slum: Salford life in the first quarter of the century (Manchester 1971) 1-16; R. Hoggart, The uses of literacy (London 1957) 1-137

[S] R. H. Wiebe, The search for order 1877-1920 (New York 1967) 44-75; R. Sennett, Families against the City: Middle class homes of industrial Chicago, 1872-1890 (Cambridge, Mass. 1970); M. H. Frisch, Town into city; Springfield, Massachusetts, and the meaning of community, 1840-1880 (Cambridge, Mass. 1972); S. B. Warner, Jr, The urban wilderness: A history of the American city (New York 1972); E. H. Powell, The evolution of the American city and the emergence of Anomie: A culture case study of Buffalo, New York: 1810- 1910 British Journal of Sociology, XIII (1962) 156-66


related to neither class consciousness nor the persistence of ascribed status but rather to the assumed intrinsic egalitarianism of American society. The limited development of working class consciousness and the absence of ascribed rank were viewed as characteristics which distinguished the new nation from the Old World and the emergence of segregated metropolitan centres involved the eclipse of an assumed or perceived egalitarian ideal and not as in Britain the dissolution of class consciousness or the disappearance of traditional social distinctions. As with the debate on class consciousness, the degree to which egalitarian ideals affected the intentions and achievements of early and mid nineteenth-century American society remains a matter of historiographic debate but only from a clear confrontation with these controversial matters will the changing residential patterns of Victorian cities be fully interpretable.{11 Certainly, the social geographic changes in cities on both sides of the Atlantic during the second half of the nineteenth century record a transition from weakly defined residential pattern in which some elements of either a traditional or idealised community persisted to one in which a more emphatic level of residential differentiation reinforced new and more complex bases of social stratification.

Population turnover and residential differentiation

The relationship between changes in the stratification of urban society and social geographic patterns may also have been complicated by high rates of population turnover. Over the past decade studies of individual urban settlements in the United States have revealed quite high rates of turnover with rarely more than one-third of the total households being recorded in two successive decennial censuses.[21 These high rates of population turnover have been related in part to the restlessness of predominantly long-distance migrants in a newly settled country but a reconnaissance study of one major English industrial city has revealed only moderate levels of persistence in a long-settled country whose cities recruited their labour forces from their adjacent hinterlands.131 The short-distance cityward movement of many migrants to English industrial cities was probably followed by a period of further mobility between urban settlements in response to conditions of insecure employment and frequent shifts in regional locations of economic growth and stagnation.

High rates of population turnover would not necessarily have created weak levels of residential differentiation for the turnover of people may have been concentrated in certain sections of the city or amongst particular social groups. Moreover, the persistence of an influential and socially prominent minority of an urban population may have imparted a sense of continuity and persistence to a community and its institutions at a time when large numbers of households were moving in and out of a settlement. The most suggestive findings of studies of population turnover in the nineteenth century are the high rates of movement amongst people of low income and status.[41 In the twentieth century low social

[l] E.g. S. Thernstrom, The other Bostonians: Poverty andprogress in the American metropolis, 1880-1970 (Cambridge 1973) 1-8; 220-61

[2] S. Themstrom and P. R. Knights, Men in motion: Some data and speculations about urban population mobility in nineteenth century America Journal of Interdisciplinary History 1 (1970) 7-35

[3] For the three decennial periods: 1841-51, 1851-61 and 1861-71 about 40% of the total household heads in Leeds remained in the city for ten years or more

[4] S. Thernstrom, op. cit. 294

112-L

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mobility has frequently been associated with low geographic mobility and the regional immobility of the poor has been viewed as one underlying cause of their predicament. Indeed, relatively high levels of intergenerational or extended family interaction have been identified amongst the urban working class and the propinquity and frequency of family contacts an invaluable social compensation that was derived from low rates of spatial mobility.[il During the nineteenth- century, however, the high rates of population turnover amongst the urban poor would have inhibited or reduced the opportunities for frequent and dense intergenerational and extended family interaction. It is possible that the internal residential differentiation of the lower strata of society discussed in the previous section created not only more homogeneous social areas but also highly localised patterns of persistence and turnover. As upwardly mobile households moved to more attractive locations, more homogeneous areas of poor and immobile households remained in districts which subsequently attracted the label “urban villages.“[21 The social organisation of these districts was assumed to resemble that of the more traditional rural world and some observers have viewed urban villages as places in which some rural patterns of life were preserved over several generations by the descendents of immigrants.[3J The ethnic ghettoes of American cities have likewise been viewed as places in which immigrants maintained fragments of traditional and customary social patterns in the midst of the urbane and rootless behaviour of the city.[41

It is, however, an open question as to whether the social organisation of urban villages was a direct survival of the traditional rural world or an adaptation to the conditions of urban life. For example, it is extremely doubtful that well developed urban villages could have flourished in mid nineteenth-century cities if the poor and not so poor were rarely able to remain in the same quarters for any considerable period of time. Moreover, recent re-evaluations of family life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggest that the frequency and propinquity of linkages between the nuclear family and extra-familial kin may have been over- stressed.tsl In view of these findings Anderson has suggested that the development of inter-generational and extended family complementarities may be a response to urban life by providing mutual support and child care at a time when employment was vulnerable and many members of a family had to work outside the home.t61 The urban village was a manifestation of the increasingly differentiated residential patterns of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities rather than a survival in any direct sense from some distant and over romanticised rural past. However, only a careful empirical investigation of the relationship between the selective suburban movement of the socially mobile, the internal residential differentiation of the lower social strata and the changing contributions

[l] M. Fried, The world of the urban working class (Cambridge, Mass. 1973) and M. Young and P. Willmott, Family and kinship in East London (Harmondsworth 1962)

[2] H. J. Gans, The urban villagers (Glencoe 1962) 3-16; R. Roberts, op. cit.; and J. Connell, Social networks in urban society Institute of British geographers, Special Publication 5 (1973) 41-52

[3] E. P. Thompson op. cit. 44-69; G. Rose, The working class (London 1968) 54 [4] R. E. Park and H. A. Miller, Old World traits transplanted (New York 1921) 60-80; C. F.

Ware, Greenwich Village, 1820-30 (Boston 1935) 3-8, 81-126; W. I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki, Polish peasant in Europe and America (New York 1927) 1468-1546

[5] P. Laslett, op. cit. [6] M. Anderson, Family structure in nineteenth century Lancashire (Cambridge 1971)


of different social groups to population turnover, will fully confirm the tentative and speculative suggestions of this section.

These considerations of social geographic changes in Victorian cities suggest that until quite late in the nineteenth century, “modem” levels and kinds of residential differentiation were quite weakly developed. Engels and other mid nineteenth-century observers described the dichotomous class division of industrial cities and clearly diagnosed the antagonistic implications of this separation but they underestimated the internal complexity of the “working-class” majority. Both the upward social mobility and internal stratification of lower socio-economic groups resulted in a more differentiated residential pattern approximating to that described by Booth and Burgess. Engels described a much more weakly differentiated city than Booth or Burgess and the minor similarities of their spatial arrangements serve to obscure rather than to reveal fundamental differences in the degree to which different levels of social stratification were recorded on the ground.

The details of these changes in the social geography of Victorian cities have been clouded and confused by the internal redistribution of the urban population and by the outward expansion of specialised central land uses, for the peripheral additions to early and mid nineteenth-century cities are now almost indistinguish- able from the inner city, whereas, once densely occupied central residential areas have been demolished and redeveloped. Both contemporary and retrospective impressions of the rapidly diminishing material record of nineteenth-century cities have tended to stress a simple dichotomous spatial separation of social groups, but it is clear that we need to know much more than we do about the implications of the changing bases of the stratification of urban society and of the changing sources and patterns of social and residential mobility.

In the United States the definition of expected or observed differences between the social geography of mid and late nineteenth-century cities was complicated by the high levels of foreign immigration and by the limited time lag between industrialisation, rapid population growth and innovations in local transportation. The more fragmentary and ephemeral manifestations of urban growth under conditions of pedestrian personal movement and limited social mobility in American cities may be more precisely recognised on the basis of findings for British cities where the effects of initial industrialisation and local transportation were chronologically quite separate. Quite apart from these comparative considerations the definition of the social geography of mid nineteenth-century cities well may be more clearly derived from descriptions of the rates and types of population turnover and movement and from the kinds and degree of interspersal of occupational and social groups than from the retrospective application of the concepts which assume a high level of residential differentiation. The kind and level of residential differentiation within Victorian cities displayed the “transitional” attributes that marked so many aspects of the age and only late in the nineteenth century would the appellation “modern” be appropriate to describe the social geography of nineteenth-century cities.

Department of Geography University qf Wisconsin-Madison

victorian cities: how modern?

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