The Establishment of the Great Central Gas Consumers’ Company in Mid-Nineteenth-Century London

Abstract

The Great Central Gas Consumers’ Company (GCGCC) was established by the metropolitan middle class to address the detrimental effects of gas industry monopoly through the promotion of market competition. It revealed that the middle class staunchly advocated for the use of liberalism to safeguard their own rights and interests, coinciding with Britain’s wider acceptance of liberalism and echoing the clarion call of the era of liberalism. Government engagement and interference in the formation of the GCGCC, as well as the ensuing disputation around it, could be seen as a manifestation of the principle of liberalism rather than a violation thereof. It reflected that liberalism was neither the absence of government nor total laissez-faire. The fact that the old gas companies adjusted their positions and compromised in favour of liberal principles demonstrated the more flexible response mechanisms of the modern industrial system to industrial and social problems, as well as the significant influence of liberalism on the development of the British industrial sector and society as a whole.