Municipal Socialism, Enterprise and Trading in the Victorian City

Abstract

By the closing decades of the nineteenth century the continued and rapid growth of cities had given rise to acute problems of municipal policy on both sides of the Atlantic. America had come to its urban experience relatively late – the population of Chicago at the time the Liverpool & Manchester Railway opened was 50 people – but between 1880 and 1910 the critical shift had taken place in the United States to a population which was over 50 per cent urban. The fifty million town dwellers in America not merely outnumbered the whole population of the UK, but included a large number of recent immigrants from the poorer, non-English speaking countries.