Great cities and manufacturing towns

Friedrich Engels[1] wrote at the beginning of the chapter on ‘The Great Towns’ in his The Condition of the Working-class in England that

What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true of all great towns. Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every man’s house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law....[2]

J.G. Kohl, a German visitor to Britain in the early 1840s, reported on the appearance of Birmingham

Birmingham, compared with Manchester is evidently deficient in large buildings and public institutions.... London has her Thames, Liverpool her Mersey....Birmingham has nothing of the kind, nothing but a dull and endless succession of house after house, and street after street.[3]

By the time he reached Leeds, Birmingham‘s ugliness was forgotten

The manufacturing cities of England are none of them very attractive or pleasing in appearance, but Leeds is, perhaps, the ugliest and least attractive town in all England. In Birmingham, Manchester and other such cities, among the mass of chimneys and factories, are scattered, here and there, splendid newsrooms or clubs, and interesting exchanges, banks, railway-stations or Wellington and Nelson monuments. Leeds has none of these.[4]

Alexis de Tocqueville noted in 1835 that

At Manchester a few great capitalists, thousands of poor workmen and little middle-class. At Birmingham, few large industries, many small industrialists. At Manchester workmen are counted by the thousand.... At Birmingham the workers work in their own houses or in little workshops in company with the master himself.... the working people of Birmingham seem more healthy, better off, more orderly and more moral than those of Manchester (where) civilised man is turned back almost into a savage.[5]

Certainly, the built environments of Birmingham and Manchester were very different: there was less overcrowding in Birmingham and the quality of street cleansing and drainage was better than Manchester and other Lancashire towns.
It is tempting to arrange England’s industrial cities along a continuum of social and economic structure from Manchester at one extreme, as Engels called it ‘the classic type of a modern manufacturing town’ by way of Leeds where factories in the woollen industry were smaller than in Lancashire cotton, to Sheffield and Birmingham, the principal examples of workshop industry. This is misleading to several respects. It ignores the major seaports, many of which like Liverpool were also industrial cities. It suggests falsely that the satellites of each of the major cities could also be ranged alone a continuum paralleling that of the regional capital. Engels’ view of Manchester as the archetypal manufacturing city is misleading and other writers stressed that it was not typical.[6]
 

Manchester, c1850

It was, however, the great cities that Victorians contemplated when they considered the urbanisation of their society. These cities and towns were multi-purpose and multi-functional and most were, to a marked degree, specialists in one or two substantial activities. Their competitive positions as great cities were geared to the fortunes of particular trades. Certainly the early expansion of towns and cities in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century led to differentiation between communities and the recognition that all towns experienced, or thought they experienced, the same problems. The major reasons for the growth of regional centres were similar to the causes of growth in London. However, by 1900 as the result of more government intervention, especially with regard to health and housing, increased dominance of national and metropolitan influences, the spread of chain stores and the diffusion of ideas and fashions from London, towns came to be more alike.

Spring Hill, Sheffield c1850
The massive increase in urban population resulted in a substantial physical increase of the built-up areas of towns. That, in turn, triggered a fundamental restructuring of urban land usage.[7] As with London, there was increasing segregation within urban communities largely as a response to a series of technological transformations.[8] In 1800, small-scale craft industries based on workshops scattered throughout the town produced for the local market. By 1900, two changes had occurred. First, large-scale, factory-based industries were established demanding extensive areas of land and accessibility to water and rail transport. The urban industrial region emerged. Secondly, workshop-based craft industries were eventually displaced. For example, the boot and shoemaker were eventually ousted by mass produced factory goods from the East Midlands; the tailor became a retailer of centrally produced off-the-peg garments. Manufacturing was concentrated into larger and distinctive regions within the town.
A whole series of changes also took place in retail technology though these were not completed until 1900.[9] Though they were not immediate and revolutionary, the end result was a radical change in the whole system. The weekly market was gradually replaced by, or transformed into, the permanent shopping centre. Up to 1850, the first stage was characterised by the building of a market hall. Michael Marks, for example, started in Leeds as a peddler or packman. By 1884, he had a stall in the open market that operated two days a week; from there he moved into the covered market that had been opened in 1857 on a daily basis; the next stage was to open stalls in other markets and by 1890 he had five. The old core of the town, or part of it, that had been a mixture of land uses became more specialised into retail or professional uses.
Mass produced goods undermined old local craft production and specialist retailers of manufactured goods replaced the old combined workshop-retailing establishments. The railways enhanced this process by providing speedy transport of even perishable commodities. Part of this process was the wider occurrence of the lock-up shop to which the retailer commuted each day. By the 1880s, both multiple and department stores appeared, the former especially in the grocery trade. Thomas Lipton started a one-man grocery store in Glasgow in 1872; by 1899, he had 245 branches throughout Britain. The greater demand for professional services, itself related to urban growth, resulted in lawyers and doctors seeking central locations. But a variety of other uses also located themselves here offering services to business, auctioneers and accountants or to the public, such as lending libraries.[10]

Upper Thames Street, Windsor, c1904
Transport technology has been examined previously but two aspects that greatly affected the towns. First, the impact of a developing railway system was a significant consumer of urban land. Secondly, in 1800, movement was primarily on foot: this has been called ‘the walking city’. By 1900, this had been transformed. The railway supplemented by the carriage, electric tram and omnibus were the main means of transport.[11]

Postcard of Tull’s Restaurant, Windsor c1903
Civic pride and civic rivalry among the industrial towns of the north were almost entirely materialistic in character and aesthetic issues played a lesser role. [12] The motives that inspired both were in part those of business. Sanitary reform made business sense as much as moral sense. Healthier workers would improve output and individuals and public authorities would be spared unproductive spending on hospitals and funeral charges. Certainly a social conscience inspired civic improvements but it is an error to neglect business needs. For the Victorians humanitarian and business aims were complementary not contradictory.[13]

Royal Crescent, Bath
In 1830, the prevailing style of Georgian urban design was theatrical, the prevailing aim one of spectacle.[14] Cities and towns had been rebuilt and refashioned with elegant assembly rooms, town halls, residential squares, parades and public gardens, settings for the rituals that helped shaped a variety of interests, landed, commercial, financial, professional into the cultural consensus of ‘polite society’. Classical styling established a common, nation-wide code for polite townscape as did other improvements to the fabric such as paving, lighting, street cleaning and the provision of piped water and sewage disposal. Noxious or dangerous trades were expelled to the districts of the poor. Other areas for the poor, notably town commons were liable to be enclosed for building genteel properties.
The building of a genteel townscape articulated a growing segregation between polite and impolite culture. But this division was never complete. The urban crowd, riotous and unpredictable, was always a threat. Aristocratic motives for restructuring towns and styles were in part patrician, an expression of an aristocratic conception of society, but they were also financial. Leading aristocrats in London, such as the Dukes of Bedford, Portland and Southampton, vied with each other to develop their estates.[15] Long-term leases realised long-term financial returns: urban land was cropped as effectively as arable soil.

Bedford Square (north side), London
The lives and living conditions of the poor were largely ignored. But after 1830, spectacle was replaced by surveillance. This reflected the attitudes of social reformers who frowned on spectacular public display and city life generally became an object of concern. The conditions of the poor could no longer be ignored; they ceased to have walk-on roles and became central to the condition of towns. Contemporaries developed the idea of the ‘dangerous classes’ especially as the working-classes tended to be concentrated in particular areas of urban communities. The spectre of contagious diseases like cholera rampaging through towns and cities and with it a variety of social pathologies prompted Victorian reformers into more vigorous strategies for social and environmental control. Metropolitan improvements ceased to be schemes to beautify London but came to be limited to ones that deal with specific evils such as traffic congestion, insanitary buildings and inefficient sewage disposal in which aesthetic considerations were secondary. There were a number of schemes, both privately and publicly funded, to improve the physical fabric of poorer urban districts and, by extension, their moral and social condition. The wide streets, model housing estates and public parks were informed by the belief that slums nourished, if not caused, a variety of pathologies, not just physical disease but crime, laziness, irreligion and insurrection. At their core therefore schemes like this were concerned with principles of social discipline.[16]
As towns and cities expanded, early Victorian reformers voiced their concern about the loss of open space for public recreation. The crisis was not actually as great as reformers believed; open country was only a short walk away in most cities. The issue was the use to which open space was put.[17] Middle-class reformers promoted ‘rational recreation’, constructive kinds of leisure as opposed to the dog racing, prize fighting and political rallies that occurred round the northern industrial towns. The first purpose-built public park was the Arboretum in Derby opened in 1840 and the first municipal park was the more extensive Birkenhead Park opened four years later (soon known as ‘the people’s park’).[18] From the 1850s, new public parks and walks were built in most industrial towns and cities, often on the edges, sometimes by enclosing common land. Some were initially financed by large employers and then handed over to municipal corporations; others were municipal ventures from the outset. New cemeteries on the edge of cities were designed for rational recreation: Undercliffe Cemetery, high above Bradford, was run as a profit-making concern by local businessmen for families who walked beside extravagant tombs of the city’s leading industrial families.[19]

The Orangery, the Arboretum, Derby
From the reform of municipal corporations in 1835 environmental improvement was entwined with middle-class radicalism and attacks on what one Whig newspaper called ‘a shabby mongrel aristocracy’.[20] Between the mid 1830s and 1850s, there were bitter disputes between those who associated improvement with sewerage, drainage and water supplies and improvers who took a broader view of civil improvement and who sought to build a new civic townscape of broad open spaces and magnificent public buildings. With the revival of urban fortunes it was improvement on the grand scale that captured the corporate imagination. In 1873, Joseph Chamberlain was elected Birmingham’s mayor, a post to which he was re-elected in 1874 and 1875. [21] He focused on improving the physical condition of the town and its people. He organised the purchase of the two gas companies and the water works; he appointed a Medical Officer of Health, established a Drainage Board, extended the paving and lighting of streets, opened six public parks and saw the start of the public transport service. His Improvement Scheme saw the demolition of ninety acres of slums in the town centre. The council bought the freehold of about half the land to build Corporation Street. The experience of Birmingham was not, however, unique.

Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradford c1860

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[1] Engels, F., The Condition of the Working-class in England in 1844, Leipzig, 1845; various editions including W.O. Henderson and W.H. Chaloner, (Blackwell), 1958, Victor Kiernan (Penguin), 1987 and Tristram Hunt, (Penguin), 2009. Carver, T., Engels, (Oxford University Press), 1981, McLellan, D., Engels, (Fontana), 1977 and Hunt, Tristram, The Frock-coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels, (Allen Lane), 2009 provide biographical detail.
[2] Ibid, Engels, F., The Condition of the Working-class in England in 1844, p. 68.
[3] Kohl, Johann Georg, England and Wales, (Chapman & Hall), 1844, reprinted, (Augustus M. Kelley), 1968, p. 6.
[4] Ibid, Kohl, Johann Georg, England and Wales, p. 49.
[5] Mayer, J.P., (ed.), Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, (Transaction Publishers), 1988, p. 104.
[6] Trinder, Barrie, ‘Industrialising towns 1700-1840’, in ibid, Clark, Peter, (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 2 : 1540-1840, pp. 805-830 and Reeder, David and Rodger, Richard, ‘Industrialisation and the city economy’, in ibid, Daunton, Martin J., (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 3: 1840-1950, pp. 553-592.
[7] Englander, David, Landlord and Tenant in Urban Britain, 1838-1918, (Oxford University Press), 1983 and Offer, Avner, Property and Politics, 1870-1914: Landownership, Law, Ideology and Urban Development in England, (Cambridge University Press), 1981, 2010. See also, Gilbert, David and Southall, Humphrey, ‘The urban labour market’, in ibid, Daunton, Martin J., (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 3: 1840-1950, pp. 593-628.
[8] Pooley, Colin G., ‘Patterns on the ground: urban form, residential structure and the social construction of space’, in ibid, Daunton, Martin J., (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 3: 1840-1950, pp. 429-466.
[9] Benson, John and Ugolini, Laura, (eds.), A nation of shopkeepers: retailing in Britain, 1550-2000, (I.B. Tauris), 2002 provides a good overview. Cohen, Deborah, Household gods: the British and their possessions, (Yale University Press), 2006 and Baren, Maurice E., Victorian shopping, (Michael O’Mara), 1998 look at what people bought.
[10] Walton, John K., ‘Towns and consumerism’, in ibid, Daunton, Martin J., (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 3: 1840-1950, pp. 715-744.
[11] Armstrong, John, ‘From Shillibeer to Buchanan: transport and the urban environment’, in ibid, Daunton, Martin J., (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 3: 1840-1950, pp. 229-257.
[12] Morley, Ian, with a foreword by Richard Fellows, British provincial civic design and the building of late-Victorian and Edwardian cities, 1880-1914, (Edwin Mellen Press), 2008.
[13] Morris, Robert John, ‘Structure, culture and society in British towns’, in ibid, Daunton, Martin J., (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 3: 1840-1950, pp. 395-426.
[14] See, for example, Ayres, James, Building the Georgian city, (Yale University Press), 1998, Chalklin, C.W., The provincial towns of Georgian England: a study of the building process, 1740-1820, (Leicester University Press), 1974 Ison, W.W., The Georgian buildings of Bath: from 1700 to 1830, (Spire), 2004 and Summerson, J.H., Georgian London, (Pimlico), 1988, 2^nd ed., (Yale University Press), 2003.
[15] See, for example, Byrne, Andrew, Bedford Square: An Architectural Study, (Athlone Press), 1990.
[16] Cunningham, Colin, Victorian and Edwardian Town Halls, (Routledge), 1981 provides insights into municipal building.
[17] Eyres, Patrick and Russell, Fiona, ‘Introduction: The Georgian Landscape Garden and Victorian Urban Park’, in Eyres, Patrick and Russell, Fiona, (eds.), Sculpture and the garden, (Ashgate), 2006, pp. 39-50.
[18] Elliott, Paul, ‘The Derby Arboretum (1840): the first specially designed municipal public park in Britain’, Midland History, Vol. 26. (2001), pp. 144-176.
[19] Clark, Colin and Davison, Reuben, In loving memory: the story of Undercliffe Cemetery, (Sutton), 2004.
[20] Cit, Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, The manor and the borough, Part 1, (Cass), 1908, p. 770.
[21] On Chamberlain in Birmingham the most recent study is Marsh, Peter, Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics, (Yale University Press), 1994. See also, Rodrick, Anne Baltz, Self help and civic culture: citizenship in Victorian Birmingham, (Ashgate), 2004 and Thompson, D.M., ‘R.W. Dale and the “civic gospel”‘, in Sell, Alan P.F., (ed.), Protestant nonconformists and the west Midlands of England : papers presented at the first conference of the Association of Denominational Historical Societies and Cognate Libraries, (Keele University Press), 1996, pp. 99-118

Saint-Hyacinthe

The comté de Saint-Hyacinthe was created in 1830 though people began to settle the area between 1756 and 1779. It was part of the district of Montreal and was wedged between the comtés de Richelieu and of Rouville in the north, Shefford in the south and the districts of Trois-Rivières and Sherbrooke in the east. Situated in the Richelieu valley, the comté is bathed in the south by the Richelieu and is crossed by the Noire and Yamaska rivers where navigation was difficulty because of the number of rapids that limited settlement until the 1780s. [1] The landscape is very flat and is broken only by the Saint-Hilaire, Rougemont and Yamaska hills. The soil is extremely rich and varied [2] and is well suited to the cultivation of cereals and livestock breeding. [3]

The comté was made up of seven seigneuries: Ramesay, Rosalie, Delorme, Debartzch, Mondelet, Yamaska and Dessaulles. In 1831, the village of Saint-Hyacinthe had a population of around a thousand people. It contained an important seminary[4] where the sons of some Patriote leaders, including Papineau, studied and was also the site of the tribunaux de comté that had a degree of judicial autonomy. [5] The presence of a significant number of inns, including two in Saint-Hyacinthe was closely related to the importance of the road network connecting Vermont with Trois-Rivières and Québec. Cereal production was the main economic activity for most habitants in the region but there was some diversification of the rural economy with tanneries, distilleries and saw-mills. Greer argues that the region had been prosperous since the mid-1790s. [6] The population of the comté increased in the 1830s and by 1832 had reached 14,000 people living in six parishes: La Présentation, Saint-Damase, Saint-Césaire, Saint-Pie, Sainte-Rosalie and Saint-Dominique. There was a large French majority in the comté who elected francophone reformist deputies.

In 1792 when Lower Canada was divided into 27 electoral comtés, the seigneurie de Saint-Hyacinthe was attached to the comté de Richelieu.[7] The first two deputies elected lived in Saint-Denis: the land surveyor Séraphin Cherrier[8] and the merchant Pierre Guérout[9]. In 1829, when the number of comtés was increased to 40, the old comté de Richelieu was divided into four including Saint-Hyacinthe. Louis-Antoine Dessaulles[10], deputy of Richelieu since 1816, represented the new comté with Louis Raynaud dit Blanchard[11]. Although newly created, the comté was a Patriote stronghold in the years leading up to the Rebellions. The seigneur Dessaulles was married to a sister of Louis-Joseph Papineau who enjoyed great popularity in the area. In 1832, following a request for Aylmer, Dessaulles agreed to sit on the Executive Council where he put forward Patriote ideas.[12] Louis Raynaud dit Blanchard (1830-1838)[13], Louis Poulin[14] (1832-1834) and Thomas Bouthillier (1834-1838)[15] were elected for the comté in his place and all three were involved in the rebellion. Bernard identified 86 habitants in the area as Patriotes of whom the main agitators were Thompson, Dr Thomas Bouthillier, Eusèbe Cartier[16], Blanchard, Poulin, Bouthillier, Dr Boucher de La Bruère, Jean-François Têtu[17], F.X. Langelier[18] and A.-A. Papineau. [19] They came largely from the villages and Choquette suggests that the rural population played little part in the risings.[20]

While there were loyalists in the region, they tended to seek support from the surrounding comtés. However, they held assemblies at Abbotsford on 13 November 1837 and others were held in Granby and Rouville where loyalists were more important.[21] The comté de Saint-Hyacinthe saw at least five Patriote assemblies from 1834 held in the town of Saint-Hyacinthe. These intensified in 1837 after the rejection of the Ninety-Two Resolutions and the most popular held on 1 June 1837 was attended by 1,600 people.[22] In addition some habitants took part in assemblies in other areas especially at Saint-Ours and Saint-Charles. There were several Patriote charivaris in the region during the late summer and autumn of 1837 including one directed against Sir John Colborne in the village of Saint-Hyacinthe. [23] The comté de Saint-Hyacinthe was not a theatre of military operation between loyalists and rebels but it was of major importance in the Patriote network for provisioning their forces especially when Saint-Charles was an armed camp.[24] No habitant from the comté was arrested or imprisoned and the role of the habitants was limited to providing means of escape to fugitives including Louis-Joseph Papineau and Wolfred Nelson. Senior maintained that Bouthillier and A.-A. Papineau led forty men from Saint-Hyacinthe to Saint-Denis[25] and that at the time of the battle of Saint-Charles they were at the head of two regiments of rebels from the comté.[26] After the battle of Saint-Charles, Papineau took refuge with his sister in Saint-Hyacinthe but was able to escape when Gore and 300 regular British troops arrived at the village. After their campaign in the Richelieu, the soldiers remained four or five days in the village and Choquette says that there were few reprisals and little destruction in the area.[27] Calm quickly returned to the comté largely because of the substantial police presence under P-E Leclerc. The only significant event in the comté in 1838 was the arrest of De La Bruyère.

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[1] Voyer, Louise, Saint-Hyacinthe, de la seigneurie à la ville québécoise, (Libre expression), 1980, p. 13

[2] Ibid, Bouchette, Joseph, Description topographique du Canada 1815, p. 323; Hudon, Christine, Prêtres et fidèles dans le diocèse de Saint-Hyacinthe 1820-1875, (Septentrion), 1996, pp. 21-21.

[3] Parizeau, Gérard, Les Dessaulles, seigneurs de Saint-Hyacinthe, (Fides), 1976, p. 52 and Blanchard, Raoul, L’ouest du Canada français, (Beauchemin), 1953, Vol. 1, pp. 30-31.

[4] Choquette, C.P., Histoire du Séminaire de Saint-Hyacinthe depuis sa fondation jusqu'à nos jours, (Imprimerie des sourds-muets), 1911.

[5] Ibid, Greer, Allan, The patriots and the people, p. 92.

[6] Ibid, Greer, Allan, The patriots and the people, p. 46.

[7] Ibid, Laporte, Gilles, Patriotes et Loyaux, pp. 194-206.

[8] DPQ, p. 162.

[9] DPQ, p. 346.

[10] DPQ, pp. 225-226.

[11] DPQ, p. 636.

[12] Ibid, Parizeau, Gérard, Les Dessaulles, seigneurs de Saint-Hyacinthe, p. 55.

[13] Messier, p. 58.

[14] DPQ, p. 614.

[15] DPQ, p. 102; Messier, p. 78.

[16] Messier, pp. 95-96.

[17] Messier, p. 455.

[18] Messier, p. 270.

[19] Messier, pp. 368-369.

[20] Choquette, C.P. Histoire de la ville de Saint-Hyacinthe, Saint-Hyacinthe, 1930, p. 145.

[21] Ibid, Bernard, Jean-Paul, Assemblées publiques, résolutions et déclarations de 1837-1838, pp. 291-293.

[22] Ibid, Bernard, Jean-Paul, Assemblées publiques, résolutions et déclarations de 1837-1838, pp. 57-61.

[23] See below, pp. 260-261.

[24] Ibid, Choquette, C.P. Histoire de la ville de Saint-Hyacinthe.

[25] Ibid, Senior, Elinor Kyte, Redcoats & Patriotes: The Rebellions in Lower Canada 1837-38, p. 82.

[26] Ibid, Choquette, C.P. Histoire de la ville de Saint-Hyacinthe, p. 145. The deposition of Alexis-Arthur Delphos stated that on 23 November 1837, 60 armed men under the command of Thomas Bouthillier de Saint-Hyacinthe asked for absolution from curé Édouard Crevier before leaving for the fighting at Saint-Charles: Archives nationales du Québec, fonds P224, pièce no. 878.

[27] Ibid, Choquette, C.P. Histoire de la ville de Saint-Hyacinthe, p. 154

London

Notions of the ‘country’ and the ‘town’ have always roused strong feelings and evoked powerful images. They have also created fundamental opposites. The ‘country’ was seen either as a natural way of life, of peace, innocence and simple virtue or as a place of ignorance, backwardness and obstruction. Round the ‘town’ clustered either the idea of it as a centre of achievement, of learning and communication or as a place of worldliness, noise, ambition and corruption. Like all stereotypes these polarities contain some truth.[1]

Towns and cities were a characteristic feature of British society in this period. By 1851, Britain was overwhelmingly an urban society and that trend continued and accelerated through to 1914. The nineteenth century saw the transformation of British society from one where one in four people lived in towns or cities to one in which over two out of three people lived in built-up areas. This urbanisation was not without its cost in human misery and deprivation, in appalling housing and polluted conditions and in ‘sweated’ workshops. But towns were also places of elegance, of conspicuous spending and wealth, resplendent with their civil buildings and parks and their sense of ‘civic pride’ and were seen by many as symbols of ‘progress’. Towns and cities were places of intense contrasts. This was not new since they had always been places of contrast. Many of the problems such as housing and sanitation existed in the medieval and early modern town.[2] What was new, however, was the scale and expansion of towns and cities and this exacerbated their problems.  The economic changes that originated in the eighteenth century led to the rapid expansion of urban centres. Towns, especially those in the forefront of manufacturing innovation, attracted rural labour, which hoped for better wages and a sense of freedom. The notion that ‘town air is free air’ was nothing new; it has its origins in medieval Germany. But labourers saw towns as places free from the paternalism and dependency of the rural environment and flocked there in their thousands.[3] For some migration brought wealth and security. For the majority life in towns was little different, and in environmental terms probably worse, from life in the country. They had exchanged rural slums for urban ones and exploitation by the landowner for exploitation by the factory master. Poverty was universal and few, whether rural or urban could escape from it.[4]

London

Between a sixth and a fifth of the total population of England lived in London. Its functions were plural. It was the largest city in the world containing the country‘s biggest concentration of industry chiefly clothing, footwear and furniture.

According to the 1851 census, 86% of London‘s employers employed fewer than ten men but some large establishments could be found such as the Woolwich Arsenal with 12,000 people in 1900 and the main railway works of the Great Eastern Railway at Stratford employing around 7,000 a decade later. The port of London was the country‘s largest and, as the epicentre of railways and roads, London was undoubtedly the chief emporium of Britain and its empire. London was the functional and ceremonial seat of politics and diplomacy, the first place of finance and the professions and the most important stage for the world of art, literature and entertainment. It was the centre and magnet for all things from luxurious living and High Society.

 

Defining London is not easy for the historian. To the Metropolitan Board of Works and the London County Council, established in 1855 and 1888-1889 respectively, it was an administrative province. To the City Corporation it was the jealously guarded enclave of about one square mile and almost immeasurable wealth. To the Registrar-General in charge of censuses London was an over-spilling, almost indeterminate, urban area. Some statistical definition was given to the concept of Greater London in 1875 when it was made to correspond to the Metropolitan Police District with a radius of fifteen miles from Charing Cross. Overall, from 1861 to 1911, the population of the administrative county grew by 61%, the Greater London conurbation 125% compared to 80% in England as a whole.[5]

The newspaper editor R.D. Blumenfeld wrote in his diary on 15 October 1900

Everybody wants to come to London; and little wonder, since the rural districts are all more or less dead, with no prospect of revival.[6]

One of the major causes of the expansion of London was migration. More women than men were migrants. Domestic service and the prospect of marriage were prevailing forces. In addition, women’s opportunities of fieldwork were reduced in the late nineteenth century and a more scientific milk trade was eliminating the ordinary milkmaid. The number of women returned in censuses as agricultural workers fell from 229,000 in 1851 to 67,000 by 1901. The majority of in-migrants were aged between 15 and 30, a situation that made the over-supply of unskilled, casual labour in the capital worse. The Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1905-1909) showed than in London people aged over 60 made up 67 per 1,000 population compared to 102 per 1,000 in mainly rural areas. The greater the city the wider its magnetic attraction and in the case of London, this extended overseas.

Wentworth Street, Whitechapel, c.1880

East European pogroms brought an additional 100,000 to 150,000 Jewish immigrants to England between 1881 and 1914.[7] Leeds, Manchester and, to a lesser extent, Liverpool were also destinations but the heaviest concentration was in East London. Whitechapel’s population in 1901 was 31.8% alien. The proportion of foreign-born in the total population of London increased from 1.57% in 1881 to 2.98% in 1901.[8] The number of Irish-born immigrants, especially in the old East End, was highest before 1860 but fell in the late nineteenth century. Most migrants from the English countryside reached London from a short distance and the proportion of migrants was proportional to the distance of their homes from the capital. Railways certainly increased the volume of migration but did not substantially alter its character. Most people moved short distance in a series of stages.

The proportion of migrants in London‘s population was falling in the nineteenth century. In the period 1851-1891, 84% of London’s increase in population came from the surplus of births, only 16% from net immigration. This feature radically distinguished London from major European cities. Two causes were outstanding. First, the superior sanitary provision of England resulted in a falling death rate. Secondly, there was an outflow of population to suburbs. This was particularly obvious in London. The square mile of the City had a resident population that peaked around 1850 at 130,000 but had dropped to 27,000 by 1901: this should be contrasted with the increase in its daytime or working population that rose from 170,000 in 1865 to 437,000 by 1921. The decline of the working-class population of the City resulted in them being jammed into the adjacent East End. Suburban railways and the underground, as well as enhanced omnibus services meant that the middle-class could move to the outer ring of Greater London; East and West Ham, Leyton, Tottenham, Hornsey, Willesden, Walthamstow and Croydon.[9]

What in an average English town was the work of one or two sanitary and housing departments was in London split between many bodies.[10] The options available to the LCC and before 1889 the Metropolitan Board of Works were unattractive and freedom of manoeuvre small. Each of the 28 Metropolitan Borough Councils (and before them, the vestries[11]) had concurrent powers with the LCC. Each was also a sanitary authority and it was their duty to overcome overcrowding and its associated problems. There was considerable difficulty in co-ordinating local government. The LCC could build but it was the responsibility of other local authorities to provide tenants with other services. Even when the LCC did build council properties the tenants were not generally displaced slum dwellers. The high price of land in London restrained the whole of the LCC‘s activity as it had to pay on average 35% higher prices per acre than provincial local authorities.

Slum clearance without providing cheap alternative accommodation made the housing situation worse. Low cost travel from homes built on cheaper suburban land was a possible solution. There was, however, a substantial time lag before needs and abilities with respect of transport, work, wages and rents approached anything like a match. For this period most of the London‘s inner-city poor were cramped in overcrowded, high-rent housing in order to remain in walking distance of work. As C.F.G. Masterman wrote in 1903

Place a disused sentry-box upon any piece of ground in South or East London and in a few hours it will be occupied by a man and his wife and family, inundated by applications from would-be lodgers.[12]

There was some improvement in overcrowding but in 1911, 27.6% of people in the inner London area were living more than two per room. This situation was not helped by the higher rents of ordinary working-class homes: in 1908, they were 70% higher than in Birmingham.

London slum

The pressure was greatest in the East End. The housing problems of London serve to illustrate several points of general importance with regard to urban development in this period. London was a living laboratory for experiment in the housing question, for individual and company philanthropy, for private enterprise and for collective public action. From 1883, the exposures of Andrew Mearns’ The Bitter Cry of Outcast London and stimulated a debate that led to the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working-classes (1884-1885). [13] There was little new in The Bitter Cry but its popularity can be explained by the sensationalist publicity it received in the Pall Mall Magazine and the climate of working-class discontent and middle- and upper-class insecurity existing in London in the 1880s. Mearns’ choice of a memorable title helped boost sales of the work and his decision to focus on the homes of the poor not merely street life was a radical departure from earlier studies. The pamphlet also hinted at horrors too ghastly to be included and this further stimulated people’s shocked emotions. [14] It also gave stimulus to investigative social work in the Settlement Movement[15], later investigative studies [16] and especially Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London.

Unregulated individualism was put on trial and, as rents rose and accommodation shortages spiralled out of control. The conclusion was emerged from this experience was that national government could not permanently stand aside since at the heart of the problem was an uneven distribution of wealth and resources. [17] Graduated direct taxation and state subsidies to local council housing were the courses that were eventually adopted. There was, and arguably still is, in the words of Joseph Chamberlain in 1883 on the Torrens and Cross housing legislation

...an incurable timidity with which Parliament...is accustomed to deal with the sacred rights of property.[18]

There were many Londons. Contemporaries noted the difference of East and West End, and the character of north and south of the river and the enclaves of Westminster and the City. It was, however, the East End that dominated contemporary comment. Writers like Walter Besant[19] and George Gissing[20] focused attention on the enormity of its problems.[21]

The East End consisted of the parishes east of Bishopsgate Street, stretching north of the Thames to the River Lea. By 1900, however, new industrial developments, the opening of the Royal Albert Dock and the Great Eastern Railway’s provision of workmen’s train services meant that East London also now included the working-class dormitories east of the Lea and south of Epping Forest. By 1900, this swollen East London contained nearly two millions people. It was virtually a one-class community with few amenities.[22] However, the work of East London displayed extraordinary variety but was mostly carried out in small workshops rather than large factories.

Frying Pan Alley, London, c.1890

The East End spanned the working-class spectrum from the sweated trades, the casual and under-employed workers who predominated in the western part and along the waterfront, to the regularly employed and quietly respectable artisans in the Poplar, Bow and Bromley districts. Each parish had its own character: some metal work but mainly cheap clothing, cigar and food preparation dominated Whitechapel; furniture, silk and toys predominated in Bethnal Green and Shoreditch; boots and shoes in Mile End; and, weaving in Spitalfields.[23] East London contained many technical inventions but also a darker side with sub-contracting, sweating, irregularity of demand and low wages. Craftsmanship survived but rarely in its totality; for example, watch makers often made only one part of a watch and used mass-produced parts for the remainder

Charles Booth‘s study of East London is an important source for the social composition of East London and provides a valuable corrective to the gloom of contemporary novelists such as Gissing. [24] He divided society into eight classes from A to H: A to F spanned the lower classes and classes G and H were the lower middle and upper middle-classes. Booth found that higher artisans (class F) made up about 13.5% of the population. B to D made up 30%, those with small regular earnings and intermittent earnings. Class E was varied but brought together most artisans and regular wage-earners and was the largest category at 42%; the lowest class A was about 1.25% of the population comprising ‘some occasional labourers, street-sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals’. This study is important in several respects. It rendered insupportable generalisations about a tidal wave of wretchedness and viciousness gaining on society and about to engulf it. Booth rejected the view that misery was all pervasive and irremediable.

Petticoat Lane, 1903

He did, however, suggest that the state of East London had been worse in the past than in the 1890s. Certainly by 1860, there was a crisis in London’s inner industrial areas as civic improvements elsewhere in the metropolis shunted thousands into adjacent working-class parishes and resulted in a cruel spiral of rising rents and increased overcrowding.[25] Workers found themselves under increasing pressure because there was insufficient cheap, plentiful or well-timed transport to, from and within the suburbs resulting in many working people being trapped in East London. The casual labour of the old East End was trapped within an economy of declining trades and conditions of employment deteriorated. By the early 1870s, London‘s shipbuilding had slumped beyond the point of recovery and by the 1880s most heavy engineering, iron founding and metal work had gone the same way. Competition from provincial furniture, clothing and footwear factories could only be met by reducing labour costs and led to the mounting importance of sweated trades.[26] London‘s industries found themselves increasingly under pressure and this had two consequences. First, the disadvantages of the least skilled were cruelly exposed. Secondly, the ‘respectable’ working-class found themselves pushed down into competing for the same work and accommodation as the casuals: this marked a dilution of labour status.[27]

The conventional middle-class perception of East London was of a foggy, malarial urban landscape, a place where revolutionary tempers might grow to overthrow society. London was an image of their fear of the streets, aversion from crowds and anxiety about impersonality. London was a place of anonymity. Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, said in a talk on ‘the London we live in’ in 1864

He looked out of the bedroom windows of the little inn in which he was staying at the surging crowd which passed and re-passed beneath him; and he could have screamed for someone who knew him or knew somebody who knew.... This feeling of isolation in the midst of a vast crowd was absolutely painful.[28]

The rapidity of growth startled the middle- and upper-classes. London was too extensive to be grasped, too impersonal to be understood. Many reacted to London as the poet Rudyard Kipling did to Chicago: ‘Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again.’[29]

The influence of London, throughout the southeast and further, was increasingly immeasurable. The capital city had grown and spread to the point of virtual amorphousness, unorganised and unorganisable. The persistent feature of London in this period was the warning it gave about cities generally: their overwhelming power to defeat those who tried to control their overall movement and development.

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[1] The issue of town and country is discussed in Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City, (Chatto), 1973 and some of its implications for an industrialising society in Weiner, M., English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1950, (Cambridge University Press), 1982.   The agenda for urban historians was set in 1968 in Dyos, H.J., (ed.), The Study of Urban History, (Edward Arnold), 1973 and the extent to which developments occurred in the following decade in Fraser, D. and Sutcliffe, A.J., (eds.), The Pursuit of Urban History, (Edward Arnold), 1983. Waller, P.J., Town, city and nation: England 1850-1914, (Oxford University Press), 1983 is a succinct study. Ibid, Clark, Peter, (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 2: 1540-1840 and ibid, Daunton, Martin J., (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 3: 1840-1950 are essential.

[2] On small towns, see, Clark, Peter, ‘Small towns 1700-1840’, in ibid, Clark, Peter (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 2: 1540-1840, pp. 733-774 and Royle, Stephen A., ‘The development of small towns in Britain’, in ibid, Daunton, Martin J., (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 3: 1840-1950, pp. 151-184

[3] On this issue, see, Feldman, David, ‘Migration’, in ibid, Daunton, Martin J., (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 3: 1840-1950, pp. 185-206.

[4] The development of town and city can be approached through Briggs, Asa, Victorian Cities, (Penguin), 1968, Dennis, R., Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century, (Cambridge University Press), 1984, Dyos, H.J. and Wolff, M., (eds.), The Victorian City: Images and Realities, two Vols. (Routledge), 1973 and ibid, Waller, P.J., Town, City and Nation, England 1850-1914.  There are several useful studies of specific cities: Olson, D.J., The Growth of Victorian London, (Batsford), 1976, Fraser, D., (ed.), A History of Modern Leeds, (Manchester University Press), 1980, Hopkins, E., The Rise of the Manufacturing Town: Birmingham and the industrial revolution, (Sutton), 1998, Daunton, M., Coal metropolis, Cardiff 1870-1914, (Leicester University Press), 1977. See also, Williamson, J.G., Coping with City Growth during the British Industrial Revolution, (Cambridge University Press), 1990 that adopt a statistical approach to the issues of urban growth; and, Koditschek, T., Class Formation and Urban Industrial Society: Bradford 1750-1850, (Cambridge University Press), 1990, that considers in depth the social and economic development of a ‘boom’ town. Morris, R.J. and Rodger, R., (eds.), The Victorian City: A Reader in British Urban History 1820-1914, (Longman), 1994 collects together important papers and has an excellent introduction that puts urban growth in its context.

[5] Schwarz, Leonard D, ‘London 1700-1840’, in ibid, Clark, Peter, (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 2: 1540-1840, pp. 641-672 and Dennis, Richard, ‘Modern London’, in ibid, Daunton, Martin J., (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 3: 1840-1950, pp. 95-131 provide an excellent overview.

[6] Blumenfeld, R.D., In the Days of Bicycles and Bustles, (Brewer and Warren), 1930, (Read Books), 2007, pp. 94-95.

[7] On Jewish migration in the second half of the nineteenth century and the role of Jewish labour in London see Feldman, David, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture 1840-1914, (Yale University Press), 1994 and Endelman, Todd M. The Jews in Britain 1656 to 2000, (University of California Press), 2000, pp. 79-182. See also, Stallard, Joshua Harrison, London pauperism amongst Jews and Christians: An inquiry into the principles and practice of out-door relief in the metropolis, and the result upon the moral and physical condition of the pauper class, (Saunders, Otley, and Co), 1867, Wechsler, R.S., The Jewish garment trade in East London 1875-1914: a study of conditions and responses, (Columbia University Press), 1979 and Berrol, Selma Cantor, East Side/East End: Eastern European Jews in London and New York, 1870-1920, (Praegar), 1994.

[8] Ibid, Lees, L. Hollen, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London and ibid, Jackson, J.A., ‘The Irish in East London’, East London Papers, Vol. 6, (1963), pp. 105-119

[9] On the development and impact of the underground, see Wolmar, Christian, The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How it Changed the City Forever, (Atlantic Books), 2004. Jackson, Alan A., ‘The London Railway Suburb 1850-1914’, in ibid, Evans, A.K.B. and Gough, John, (eds.), The impact of the railway on society in Britain: essays in honour of Jack Simmons, pp. 169-180.

[10] See, for example, Hardy, A., ‘Parish pump to private pipes: London’s water supply in the 19^th century’, in Bynum, W.F. and Porter, R., (eds.), Living and dying in London, (Wellcome Institute), 1991, pp. 76-93.

[11] The vestry had its origins in medieval England having been established as early as the fourteenth century to manage church affairs. However, in the early modern period it became a general administrative body. In large industrialising parishes or in places where the leading inhabitants formed executive committees, known as ‘select vestries’, most of the population were excluded. Inevitably the vestry began to involve itself in every aspect of local administration because it had the right to set parish rates to finance the work of its officials. Its influence only declined after 1834 when it lost its responsibilities for the poor law to the Poor Law Unions with their Boards of Guardians. In 1894, it was finally replaced by parish councils.

[12] Masterman, C.F.G., From the Abyss: Of Its Inhabitants, (R.B. Johnson), 1903, reprinted (Garland Press), 1980, p. 12.

[13] Mearns, Andrew, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor, (James Clarke & Co), 1883, reprinted edited by A.S. Wohl, (Leicester University Press) 1970 and extracts in Keating, P., (ed.), Into Unknown England 1866-1913, (Fontana), 1976, pp. 91-111. There is some debate as to whether Andrew Mearns or William Preston was the author. The pamphlet was certainly either written or heavily revised by Rev. William C. Preston with Rev. James Munro helping with the research and composition of the work as well.

[14] Under William T. Stead, the Pall Mall Magazine devoted a great deal of space to promoting the pamphlet and between mid-October and early November 1883, published at least one article a day on ‘Outcast London’. Supported by the Daily News, and with a combination of sensationism and moral righteousness, Stead was able to keep the public’s atention focused on the London poor for the next two months.

[15] Hamilton, Richard, ‘A hidden heritage: The social settlement house movement 1884-1910’, Journal of Community Work and Development, Vol. 2, (2), (2001), pp. 9-22 and Meacham, Standish, Toynbee Hall and social reform, 1880-1914: the search for community, (Yale University Press), 1987.

[16] See, Sims, G.R., How the Poor Live: And, Horrible London, (Chatto & Windus), 1898 and Wilson, Keith, ‘Surveying Victorian and Edwardian Londoners: George R. Sims’ Living London’, in Phillips, Lawrence, (ed.), A mighty mass of brick and smoke: Victorian and Edwardian representations of London, (Rodopi), 2007, pp. 131-149.

[17] On the revival of the ‘condition of England question’, see, Haggard, Robert, F., The Persistence of Victorian Liberalism: the politics of social reform in Britain, 1870-1900, (Greenwood Publishing), 2001, pp. 27-52

[18] Chamberlain, Joseph, Fortnightly Review, Vol. 40, (1883), p. 767.

[19] Besant wrote several books on London including East London, (Century Co.), 1901 and South London, (Chatto & Windus), 1899. In both he was highly critical and was capable of dismissing as of no account the greater part of London that was not the City or West End. The Lumpenproletariat East London and artisan and petty-bourgeois South London were each for him a travesty of urban civilisation.

[20] George Gissing was the most gifted novelist to employ late-nineteenth century London as a backcloth to his fiction. Whether writing of working-class Clerkenwell and Hoxton, as in The Nether World, (Smith, Elder and Co), 1889 and Demos: A Story of English Socialism, (Harper & Brothers), 1886 or artisan and petty-bourgeois Camberwell, in In the Year of the Jubilee, (Lawrence and Bullen), 1894, the picture of the streets was of drab squalor. Gissing’s London was the London of defeat, a nightmare region; in The Nether World, p. 205 ‘beyond the outmost limits of dread’ and p. 167, ‘a city of the damned’. His urban world was barren, barbaric and beyond redemption.

[21] Domville, E.W., ‘“Gloomy City, or, the deeps of Hell”: the presentation of the East End in fiction between 1880 and 1914’, East London Papers, Vol. 8, (1965), pp. 98-109.

[22] See Steffel, R.V., ‘The evolution of a slum control policy in the East End, 1889-1907’, East London Papers, Vol. 13 (1970), pp. 23-35.

[23] Leech, Kenneth, ‘The decay of Spitalfields’, East London Papers, Vol. 7, (1964), pp. 57-62. See also, Kerchen, Anne J., Strangers, aliens and Asians: Huguenots, Jews and Bangladeshis in Spitalfields, 1660-2000, (Routledge), 2005.

[24] Booth, Charles, Life and Labour of the People in London: Vol. 4, The trades of East London, (Macmillan), 1893.

[25] On conditions in London in the 1860s the standard work is Jones, Gareth Steadman, Outcast London: a study in the relationship between classes in Victorian society, (Oxford University Press), 1971 where the ‘arithmetic of woe’ can be seen graphically illustrated. See also the contemporary prints by the French artist Gustave Doré.

[26] See, Hall, P.G., ‘The East London footwear industry: an industrial quarter in decline’, East London Papers, Vol. 5, (1962), pp. 3-21 and Oliver, J.L., ‘The East London furniture industry’, East London Papers, Vol. 4, (1961), pp. 88-101.

[27] Brodie, Marc, The politics of the poor: the East End of London 1885-1914, (Oxford University Press), 2004.

[28] Cit, ibid, Waller, P.J., Town, City and Nation, England 1850-1914, p. 49.

[29] Kipling, Rudyard, From sea to sea: letters of travel, (Doubleday, Page and Co.), 1900, p. 276.

Rouville

The comté de Rouville, named after Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville (1668-1722), was created in 1829. Before that date, Rouville was part of the comté de Bedford. Situated in the Vallée-du-Richelieu, the comté de Rouville extended from to the American border at Lake Champlain north to Saint-Hilaire. To the west it is bordered by the Richelieu River and in the east by the comtés de Saint-Hyacinthe, Shefford and Missisquoi. The comté consisted of a great plain cleared along the Richelieu and three mountains, Saint-Hilaire, Rougemont and St-Grégoire and three important rivers, the Richelieu, the Rivière des Hurons and the Rivière du Sud. It was part of the district of Montreal and contained seven seigneuries: Rouville, Monnoir, Chambly-Est, Bleury, Sabrevois, Noyan and Foucault.[1] The six principal parishes of the comté, situated for the most part along the river, were Saint-Hilaire, Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Saint-Mathias, Sainte-Marie-de-Monnoir, Saint-Athanase and Saint-Georges. [2] The comté was divided into two main areas. Its northern section lay in the Bas-Richelieu and was rural, agricultural, Catholic and solidly French Canadian, one of the principal Patriote strongholds during the rebellions. The southern part of the comté was in the Haut-Richelieu and its communities were largely Anglo-American, Protestant and loyal to the British Crown. [3] In 1831, the comté had a population of 18,115 habitants. [4]

Rouville was one of the most important farming areas in Quebec largely because of its fertile soil. Wheat, flour and cereals were its three main agricultural products. From 1810, commercial apple growing developed in Saint-Hilaire. Like other parts of Lower Canada, Rouville was badly affected by the agrarian crisis of the 1830s. According to Ouellet, the fall in agricultural prices and a series of bad harvest caused by rust and insects led to famine in the region. [5] There was some diversification in the region’s rural economy. The timber industry developed using the important forests in the comté. The textile industry, especially in Saint-Mathias boomed in 1837 following the Patriotes’ decision to boycott British imports and wear home-spun woollen cloth. By 1837, Saint-Matthias, with three well-stocked quays, was regarded as the commercial crossroads of the region and river trade led to some prosperity in the comté.

In 1830, Jean-Baptiste René Hertel de Rouville, seigneur of the comté de Rouville was deputy for the region in the Legislative Assembly and also sat on the Legislative Council.[6] De Rouville was hostile to the reform movement and was regarded by the Parti Patriote as a traitor.[7] The 1834 elections saw an increasing polarisation of votes between Patriotes and Loyalists. Thomas Lemay, a dissident in the Parti Patriote, and B. Holmes faced Pierre Carreau[8] and Dr Antoine-Eusèbe Bardy[9] and the Patriotes won both seats. There was now no member of the Legislative Council in the region. After the elections in 1834, many assemblies were held in the comté de Rouville by both Loyalists and Patriotes. The first loyalist assembly, chaired by Conrad Derck was held at Clarenceville (Saint-Georges) on 12 March 1834 to protest about the Ninety-Two Resolutions. Albert Chapman and Reuben Taylor were the principal speakers at this meeting. Three years later, on 13 October 1837, a further loyalist assembly was held at Clarenceville to protest against attempts by the Patriotes to weaken or break the colony’s links with Britain and even to suspend the Legislative Assembly.[10] Then on 8 November, the citizens of Clarenceville organised a further assembly in order to organise a loyalist petition that 353 people signed. Then, on 30 November 1837, a meeting was held outside the church of Sainte-Marie-de-Monnoir.

For their part, the Patriotes also held several meetings at Sainte-Marie-de-Monnoir. On 9 February 1833, the electors of M. Rainville addressed the other electors in the region asking them to vote for Ludger Duvernay. On 8 March 1834, Doctor François-Joseph Davignon[11] held a meeting at his house, chaired by Étienne Poulin[12], to promote the Ninety-Two Resolutions. Two days later, Antoine-Eusèbe Bardy chaired a meeting at the hôtel Henderson at Saint-Athanase where those present signed a petition in favour of the Ninety-Two Resolutions. Several days later, the resolutions agreed at Saint-Athanase were publicised in churches throughout the comté. On 30 April 1834, Patrick Murray, a farmer from Sainte-Marie-de-Monnoir held a meeting for the Irish habitants from the south-west of the region. On 22 July 1835, there was a meeting at the house of Édouard Vancelette that formed a branch of the Montreal Constitutional Association for the comté de Rouville. The most important meeting in the region, organised by F-J Davignon, took place at Saint-Athanase on 5 November 1837 that sought some conciliation between Patriotes and Constitutionalists.[13] It was called by

...des personnes d’opinion différente dans la politique de cette Province aux fins d’aviser aux moyens de conciliation entre les parties Patriotes et Constitutionnels.[14]

The key figures involved in this assembly were: Timothée Franchère[15] (president), Eustache Soupras[16] and Gabriel Marchand (vice-presidents), F-J Davignon and Ls. M. Decoigne[17] (secretaries). Its twenty-four reformist resolutions concerned the composition of the Legislative Council, control of the Civil List and also the abolition of the seigneurial regime.

On 28 February 1838, 600-700 rebels came from the United States and met at the Caldwell manor in the seigneurie de Noyan (comté de Rouville). Robert Nelson, who chaired this gathering presented the Déclaration d’indépendance de la République du Bas-Canada. It proclaimed the independence of Lower Canada from Great Britain, introduced a republican form of government with universal suffrage and the abolition of seigneurial tenure.[18] Nelson also called on the people of Canada to rise up in rebellion. After proclaiming independence, the rebels were forced to retreat back across the border when faced with the threat from loyalist militias.

During the rebellions of 1837-1838, the comté de Rouville was an important theatre of military action, though on a smaller scale than in the Richelieu. Between 1834 and 1838, Patriote and loyalist activity in the region was very similar in terms of meetings and levels of support though the Patriotes managed to organise slightly more events than the loyalists. During October and November 1837, there were dozens of charivaris in the Richelieu including one at St-Athanase.[19] During the rebellion of 1837, part of the Patriote militia was based at Saint-Mathias in the comté de Rouville. The main rebel leaders were: Dr François-Joseph Davignon (Sainte-Marie-de-Monnoir), merchants Louis Marchand and Eustache Soupras from Saint-Mathias and Édouard-Élisée Malhiot. [20] On 10 November 1837, thirty rebels from Saint-Athanase, led by Pierre-Paul Demaray[21] (St-Jean), Davignon and Patrick McKeenan[22] (Saint-Athanase) attacked some loyalists who were moving towards St-Jean. On 28 November, there was a brief skirmish at Saint-Mathias between British troops led by Wetherall and a group of rebels led by Malhiot.

During 1838, several Frères Chasseurs lodges were established in the comté de Rouville, including ones at Sainte-Marie-de-Monnoir and Saint-Athanase. On 3 and 4 November, rebels gathered at Saint-Mathias in preparation for an attack on the garrison at Chambly. At the same time, 300 Patriotes from Saint-Athanase took possession of the village of Christieville (Iberville).[23] On 7 November, some houses in Saint-Athanase were looted and burned down: the merchant Charles Mongeau, landlord François Macé and the butcher Jean-Baptiste Arcand were the three main victims of these acts of vandalism. Following the rebellion in 1838, Timothée Franchère, a tradesman of Saint-Mathias, was imprisoned for his participation and François Nicolas[24], a teacher and farmer from Saint-Athanase, was among the twelve rebels who are hung. [25]

Between 1840 and 1850, the comté de Rouville faced falling population caused largely by rural migration. The wheat trade was in decline because of the closure of external markets and the growth in wheat production in Upper Canada and the Mid-West of the United States. The trade in hay and fodder increased significantly as trade with New England developed. However, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the development of railways and the river trade that the economy of the region fully recovered.

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[1] Ibid, Bouchette, Joseph, Description topographique du Canada 1815, pp. 207-209.

[2] Cardinal, Armand, Histoire de Saint-Hilaire: The Seigneurs de Rouville, (Editions Du Jour), 1980; ibid, Laporte, Gilles, Patriotes et Loyaux, pp. 226-236.

[3] Filion, Mario et collaborateurs, Itinéraire toponymique de la Vallée-du-Richelieu, Études et recherches toponymiques, 10, (Gouvernement du Québec), 1984, p. 2

[4] Ibid, Girod, Amury, Notes sur le Bas-Canada, p. 14.

[5] Ibid, Ouellet, Fernand, Histoire économique et sociale du Québec 1760-1850: structures et conjonctures, pp. 333-336.

[6] DPQ, p. 366.

[7] Cardinal, Armand, ‘Saint-Hilaire et l’insurrection de 1837’, Les cahiers d’histoire de la Société d'histoire de Beloeil-Mont-Saint-Hilaire, no. 22, (1987), p. 25.

[8] DPQ, pp. 128-129.

[9] DPQ, p. 29; Messier, pp. 22-23.

[10] Ibid, Bernard, Jean-Paul, Assemblées publiques, résolutions et déclarations de 1837-1838, pp. 223-225.

[11] Messier, p. 133.

[12] Messier, p. 393.

[13] Ibid, Bernard, Jean-Paul, Assemblées publiques, résolutions et déclarations de 1837-1838, pp. 286-290.

[14] Archives nationales du Québec, E-99-100

[15] Messier, pp. 194-195.

[16] Messier, pp. 445-446.

[17] Messier, p. 135.

[18] Ibid, Greer, Allan, The patriots and the people, p. 301.

[19] Ibid, Greer, Allan, The patriots and the people, p. 219.

[20] ‘Edouard-Elisée Malhiot’, DCB, Vol. 10, pp. 491-492; Messier, pp. 315-316.

[21] Messier, p. 137.

[22] Messier, p. 330.

[23] Ibid, Fortin, Réal, La guerre des Patriotes: le long du Richelieu, p. 66.

[24] Messier, p. 353.

[25] Ibid, Bernard, Jean-Paul, Les Rébellions de 1837-1838: Les patriotes du Bas-Canada dans la mémoire collective et chez les historiens, p. 132.

Richelieu

The region of Richelieu is divided into two distinct parts that corresponded to their position in relation to the Richelieu River. The Bas-Richelieu is located between where the Richelieu joins the St Lawrence as far as the comté de Rouville and Beloeil and forms the comté de Richelieu. [1] It is bordered in the west by the Richelieu River, the principal communication route, to the north by the St Lawrence and to the east by the Yamaska River and the comté de Saint-Hyacinthe. In contained six parishes in 1837: Sorel, Saint-Ours, Saint-Denis, Saint-Charles, Saint-Jude and Saint-Barnabé.[2] The parishes along the Richelieu and St Lawrence were the most developed: Sorel, Saint-Ours, Saint-Denis and Saint-Charles. Saint-Jude and Saint-Barnabé were then regarded as missions. The population of the comté in 1835 was 16,149 and was overwhelmingly French Canadian.[3] The only exception was Sorel, the village of William Henry where forty% of its 1,063 habitants were anglophones.[4]

The comté was discovered by Samuel de Champlain and named after Cardinal de Richelieu who had ordered the colonisation of New France. Its temperate climate, fertile soil and access to the resources of the forests accelerated the granting of seigneuries in the seventeenth century. It was the Richelieu River that proved the major contributor to the development of the region. Its communication links placed the comté in a particularly advantageous position with other areas of Lower Canada. In 1829, the colonial government developed plans, which took twenty years to implement, to improve communication on the Richelieu by building a lock at Saint-Ours to increase regional trade upstream from the village.[5] The comté was one of the most important centres for agriculture and animal rearing in Lower Canada but there was also cultivation of flax and hemp.[6] Habitants also grew peas and beans, oats and corn for domestic use. Like other parts of Lower Canada, the Richelieu was affected by the downturn in the economy in the early 1830s and potatoes replaced wheat as the major crop.

The economy of the Richelieu diversified during the first half of the nineteenth century with the development of small-scale rural industries. This process was helped by the appearance of steamboats on the Richelieu stimulating the development of industries that now had easy and cheaper access to markets. In 1831, the pottery industry in Saint-Denis employed 31 people and there was also an important manufacturer of coaches in the same parish.[7] Saint-Charles, Saint-Denis and especially Saint-Ours became distribution centres for manufactured goods. Road and water links gave easy access to the markets of Montreal and Quebec. The area had mills for pressing linseed oil, a brewery, distillery and brickyard. [8] During the 1830s, Saint-Charles had industries that were less common: a foundry, a tannery and also, from 1833 to 1836, its own newspaper, L’Écho du pays. Although not well situated for farming, Sorel’s strategic position at the mouth of the Richelieu proved important. The development of commercial maritime trade from 1809 resulted in shipbuilding and particularly ship maintenance industries being developed and from 1837 to 1866 the village had an important military garrison.

The comté de Richelieu generally elected deputies from the Parti Patriote.[9] François-Roch de Saint-Ours[10] and Pierre-Dominique Debartzch[11], both seigneurs, were regarded as Patriotes until the mid-1830s when they found their moderate reformist position increasing sidelined by more radical Patriotes. Clément-Charles Sabrevois de Bleury broke with Papineau and was dismissed as deputy for Richelieu in 1836. [12] Because Sabrevois de Bleury was considered too moderate, the Patriotes met at Saint-Ours and demanded his resignation replacing him with Wolfred Nelson[13], a committed radical. On Saint-Jean-Baptiste in 1836, Nelson had defied the instructions of Mrg Lartigue and erected a monument to the memory of Louis Marcoux, killed on 8 November in a brawl with loyalists during the 1834 elections. Deputy Jacques Dorion[14] and Simeon Marchesseau[15] joined him in inflammatory speeches on the ‘immortal Ninety-Two Resolution’.[16]

On 7 March 1837, the popular assembly at Saint-Ours, chaired by Côme-Séraphin Cherrier[17], was attended by 1,200 people and denounced Russell’s Ten Resolutions. [18] During the autumn of 1837, the Patriotes in the comté de Richelieu adopted a more aggressive approach, taking part in charivari and in September in Saint-Denis burning Lord Gosford, Sabrevois de Bleury, Debartzch and Saint-Ours in effigy.[19] On 23 and 24 October, the assembly of the Six-Comtés was held at Saint-Charles attended by between 1,000 and 4,000 people from the comtés of Saint-Hyacinthe, Rouville, Chambly, Verchères and Richelieu. It protested against political injustice but also established a regional federation ‘to celebrate the unity and determination of the people’.[20] It also marked the point when political rhetoric began to turn into military action.[21]

During November 1837, comté de Richelieu saw several bloody encounters between Patriote rebels and British forces.[22] the On 18 November, Thomas Storrow Brown[23], general of the Fils de la Liberté occupied the manor of seigneur Debartzch at Saint-Charles and established an armed Patriote camp. [24] Wolfred Nelson established a camp at Saint-Denis at the same time. [25] On 23 November, there was an unsuccessful attack by British regulars under Lieutenant-Colonel Gore on Saint-Denis that left twelve dead on both sides.[26] Two days later, troops led by Wetherall successfully attacked the Patriotes at Saint-Charles leaving three soldiers dead and between 32 and 152 Patriotes. [27] On 2 December 1837 Gore returned to Saint-Denis and burned several buildings but the following day soldiers discovered the body of Lieutenant George Weir and destroyed the distillery of Wolfred Nelson.[28]

Towards the end of 1838, Malhiot[29] took command of the Frères Chasseurs of Saint-Charles, Saint-Denis and Saint-Ours, a force of nearly 2,000 men.[30] In the grandiose plans developed by Robert Nelson for the second rebellion, Malhiot’s role was to attack the garrison at Sorel to obtain its arms and munitions. During the night of 9-10 November, Malhiot and three hundred men left Saint-Ours in the direction of Sorel but turned back when they learned of the defeat of Nelson’s troops further south at Odelltown. Calm in the region was restored when regular troops moved south of the St Lawrence.[31] The 2,000 rebels at St-Charles, St-Denis and St-Ours dispersed. A patrol sent into the hills round Boucherville found that the Patriotes under Malhiot had disbanded without a fight and the camp which, between 6 and 10 November contained 1,000 men, empty. The area, particularly Saint-Charles and Saint-Denis, was ravaged by the rebellions and its economy took a long time to recover.

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[1] Ibid, Bouchette, Joseph, Description topographique du Canada 1815, pp. 200-230

[2] Ibid, Bouchette, Joseph, Description topographique du Canada 1815, pp. 206-230

[3] Girod, Amury, Notes sur le Bas-Canada, (Village Debartzch, imprimerie de J.P. Boucher-Belleville), 1835, p. 94

[4] Ibid, Courville, Serge, Entre ville et campagne: L’essor du village dans les seigneuries du Bas-Canada, p. 284

[5] Filion, Mario, Chambly, (Éditions passé présent), 1988, p. 32

[6] Ibid, Bouchette, Joseph, Description topographique du Canada 1815, p. 225

[7] Courville, Serge, Entre ville et campagne: L’essor du village dans les seigneuries du Bas-Canada, p. 154

[8] Greer, Allan, Habitants, marchands et seigneurs: La société rurale du Bas Richelieu, 1740-1840, (Septentrion), 1999, p. 259

[9] Ibid, Laporte, Gilles, Patriotes et Loyaux, pp. 175-194.

[10] DPQ, p. 679.

[11] DPQ, pp. 207-208; ‘Pierre-Dominique Debartzch’, DCB, Vol. 7, 1836-1850, pp. 235-237.

[12] Rumilly, Robert, Papineau et son temps, 2 Vols. (Fides), 1977, Vol. I, p. 403; DPQ, pp. 673-674.

[13] DPQ, p. 554; ‘Wolfred Nelson’, DCB, Vol. 9, 1861-1870, pp. 593-597.

[14] DPQ, pp. 231-231.

[15] Messier, pp. 320-321.

[16] Ibid, Rumilly, Robert, Papineau et son temps, Vol. I, p. 408.

[17] ‘Côme-Séraphin Cherrier’, DCB, Vol. 9, pp. 187-189; Messier, pp. 109-110.

[18] Lacoursière, Jacques, (ed.), Histoire populaire du Québec 1841-1846, Vol. 3, (Septentrion), 1996, p. 314; ibid, Bernard, Jean-Paul, Assemblées publiques, résolutions et déclarations de 1837-1838, pp. 23-28.

[19] Senior, Elinor Kyte, Les habits rouges et les Patriotes, (VLB), 1997, p. 51.

[20] Ibid, Greer, Allan, The patriots and the people, p. 205

[21] Ibid, Bernard, Jean-Paul, Assemblées publiques, résolutions et déclarations de 1837-1838, pp. 259-285.

[22] See, Fortin, Réal, La guerre des Patriotes: le long du Richelieu, (Editions Mille Roches), 1988 and Lambert, Pierre, Les Patriotes de Beloeil: le mouvement patriote, les insurrections de 1837-1838 et les paroissiens de Beloeil, (Septentrion), 1994.

[23] ‘Thomas Storrow Brown’, DCB, Vol. 11, pp. 116-117 is a convenient summary; see also, Messier, p. 86.

[24] Meunie, Pierre, L’insurrection à Saint-Charles et le Seigneur Debartzch, (Fides), 1986 is the most detailed account. Bellemare, Georges, Saint-Charles 1837 et la survie d’un peuple menacé, (Guérin), 2005, is a good account of the battle and is especially interesting on the number of Patriote dead.

[25] Séguin, Robert-Lionel, La victoire de Saint-Denis, (Parti pris), 1964, Boissonault, C.-M., ‘Les patriotes a Saint-Denis’, Revue de l’Université Laval, Vol. 5, (1951), pp. 777-790, and Richard, J. B., Les événements de 1837 à Saint-Denis-sur-Richelieu, (Societe d’histoire regionale de Saint-Hyacinthe), 1938, are useful, studies of the battle.

[26] Ibid, Senior, Elinor Kyte, Les habits rouges et les Patriotes, p. 126.

[27] Ibid, Senior, Elinor Kyte, Les habits rouges et les Patriotes, p. 141.

[28] Ibid, Senior, Elinor Kyte, Les habits rouges et les Patriotes, p. 153.

[29] ‘Edouard-Elisée Malhiot’, DCB, Vol. 10, pp. 491-492.

[30] Ibid, Senior, Elinor Kyte, Les habits rouges et les Patriotes, p. 266.

[31] Ibid, Senior, Elinor Kyte, Les habits rouges et les Patriotes, p. 266.