Social Structure and Politics in Birmingham and Lyons (1825-1848)

Abstract

r NHE RAPID increase in the size of tonvns in the early nineteenth century amazed and alarmed politicians and administrators. They . i were afraid of large of people over whom they could at best administer a distant control-masses of people who did not fit into the traditional social pattern of small town and predominant countryside. Disraeli was one of many who contrasted the mighty mysterious masses 2 of the swollen touZns and that free order and that natural gradation of ranks which are but a type and image of the economy of the universe.3 The free order ') was the more highly praised because it was so difficult to establish from above a satisfactory artificial order. Effective administration was expelimental and expensive, effective police control was lacking, and so deep were many of the new cleavages in soaety that there were frequent attempts from below to meet force or the threat of force by counter-^riolence. The large towns, which provided new opportties for political discussion and action, were often centres of subversive ideas which seemed to threaten the bases of constitutional government. Marx acknowledged in the Communist Manifesto that the bourgeoisie in creating enormous cities had rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural lifeJ'. Subject to changed and changing routines neither workers nor manufacturers accepted existing conditions without question. Inquiry led to protest) and protest might lead to revolt. Birmingham and Lyons were two of the most important towns in Europe in the penod between the end of the Napoleonic VVars and the Revolutions of I848. Neither tosvn was a new product of the eighteenth-century industrial revolution. Lyons was of course an important Roman town, and the founda-