The Victorian City: A Review Article

Abstract

The contents and format of The City prompt comparison with Early England 1830-1865, superintended 40 years ago by G. M. Young. Both are collections of essays by diverse authors, 38 in the new work and 17 in the old, filling about 900 pages. Both are illustrated, but in revealingly different ways. The plates in Early Vic torian England, mostly reproducing topographical watercolours, fashion plates and photographs, often miss the points they are presumably intended to demonstrate and some appear to have been included as make-weight picturesque landscape or as Victorian absurdities. Few of the illustrations are discussed in the text. The photographs in The City, on the other hand, are much more plentiful and are regularly pertinent to the argument. Each is fully captioned. Visually, and in other ways that I shall indicate later, The City is a more professional and interesting job. Three essays in the old collection, Town And London, by R. H. Mottram, Work And Wages and Life In the New Towns, by the Claphams, and remarks in other essays, especially Young's famous Portrait Of An Age, bear directly on subjects treated in The City. Comparisons between the two books highlight many of the advances in the study of nineteenth century history during the last generation and yield a measure of the present state of the art. The old essayists differ notably from their Anglo-American successors in being direct legatees of the world they wrote about. The Claphams, Mottram and Young could all remember cities and their better class suburbs: they were secure in their places among the late English professional classes, confident of their know ledge of the mores of their class, and prodigiously well-read about their heritage. Their essays are firmly grounded in a mass of anecdotal and official information about middle class ways of life, and they are shrewdly allusive about the artistocracy and the lower orders. Implicitly, the growth of cities and distinctively urban ways of life are straight forward processes instigated by the middle classes for the benefit of all. The evidence for these developments, at least among people who matter, is easily discoverable. If Mottram and Young sweated over their researches, they do not show it: whereas the weaker souls among their successors in the 1970s parade their labours and their angst in the faith that professionals are saved by toil alone. Young and Mottram casually exhibit the opinions of city dwellers by quoting Carlyle or Mrs. Gaskell, backed by personal reminiscence. Their approach is from above. They see urban delinquencies and dirt as problems primarily for government and the advance line of aristo cratic and middle class reformers, rather than as torments for slum dwellers. Their view of the working classes and the poor, who formed the majority of the population, is sympathetic but cool. The lower orders are victims of the historical process, not contributors to it, let