Abstract
ABSTRACT:This article describes the creation of a new urban classification based on the 1891 census of England and Wales. It is the first attempt to use the recently available electronic version of the census (I-CeM) to classify all large towns in late Victorian England and Wales on their economic structure. Where previous scholars were restricted by the form of occupation data contained in the published census reports, I-CeM allows manipulation of the data in order to aggregate urban units and examine their occupational structures in great detail. The classification is then used to compare key socio-economic characteristics of different towns.
Highlights
This article describes the creation of a new urban classification based on the 1891 census of England and Wales
There were plenty of studies of, and commentary on, the state of particular towns, and much debate on the nature of urban life in general, but these tended to operate on the assumption that towns were, in general, all similar in character; as Engels famously commented, ‘What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true of all great towns.’[4]. This belief in the similarity of the urban experience was echoed by Robert Vaughan, an author as convinced of the benefits of urban life as Engels was of the harm that towns caused
Distinctions were sometimes made between towns based on population growth and economic underpinnings; for example, Vaughan suggested that easy access to coal determined why Birmingham and Manchester thrived while Canterbury and Taunton ‘remain nearly stationary’
Summary
Nineteenth-century observers were not much concerned with creating an urban hierarchy. The same typology was repeated in the census reports for 1851–71, which included some discussion of the different rates of population growth in the various types of towns, but made little analytical use of the classification.[9] A similar account can be given of later nineteenth-century authors. Commentators such as Booth and Rowntree confined their studies to single cities, confident that their findings would apply to settlements of different size and economic structure.[10]. &c. in the Twenty Years from 1881 to 1901 (London, 1911), 3; see Welton, ‘On the distribution of population in England and Wales, and its progress in the period of ninety years from 1801–1891’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 63 (1900), 527–89
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