The British American Land Company

The leader-associate system failed to bring about the expected settlement of the Eastern Townships. Land held by speculators remained undeveloped and off the market. Speculators were waiting for the pioneers to clear their lands and build roads, schools, and churches. Once this happened, they knew that more settlers would want to come, land prices would rise, and their profits would soar. The first project for establishing a colonisation company for Lower Canada occurred in 1824. The idea was proposed by William Felton, a rich landowner from Sherbrooke who knew about the Canada Land Company directed by John Galt that had been set up in Upper Canada.[1] Felton asked for the concession to invest in the road network, bridges, Protestant schools and other infrastructure.[2] The project received support from several influential Londoners including Ellice, Gould and Gillespie but the financial crisis on the mid-1820s in Britain resulted in the idea being put on hold.

After the crisis, the project did not resurface in London until 1832 when a group of English merchants formed the British American Land Company (BALC). It was based on a scheme for colonisation and land speculation in Lower Canada devised by John Galt. Two Montreal merchants, Peter McGill and George Moffat, were appointed commissioners of the company in Lower Canada.[3] They organised the financing necessary to send Samuel Brooks, former deputy of Sherbrooke[4], to London with a petition supporting the establishment of the BALC.[5] In May 1834, a regional office of the BALC was opened in Brooks’ house in Lennoxville and he became its first secretary. The following year, the office was moved to Sherbrooke. [6]

The company received a torrent of protest from the Parti Patriote and its practices were denounced in the Ninety-Two Resolutions.[7] Also the reformist weekly British Colonist, printed in Stanstead by Silas Horton Dickerson, denounced the arrival of the BALC in the Cantons de l’Est. Ironically, after many financial problems, the presses of this newspaper were taken to Sherbrooke and subsequently used to print the Tory newspaper Farmer’s Advocate and Townships Gazette financed by the BALC and the merchants of Stanstead.[8] However, the Russell Resolutions in March 1837 made the government’s support for the BALC clear:

6. That the legal title of the North American Land Company to the land holden by the said company, by virtue of a grant of from His Majesty, under the public seal of the said province, and to the privileges conferred on the said company by the Act for that purpose made, in the fourth year of his Majesty’s reign, ought to be maintained inviolate.

The company began with more than 500,000 acres of Crown lands in the comtés de Shefford, Sherbrooke and Stanstead.[9] The aim of the company was to sell land specifically to British colonists but American settlers also purchased land. It also gave contracts for road and bridge building. Wishing to extend the amount of land it owned, the company bought further land recommended by its agents. The problem was that this led to widespread land speculation. Owners of land close to that owned by the company were able to sell them to the BALC at a handsome price. This led speculators to buy land located close to future roads or land developments that they could then sell to the BALC for a profit generally without having made any improvements. Between 1835 and 1837, the colonisation project was a striking success; the BALC built roads, bridges, and even villages for immigrants and transformed Sherbrooke from a modest village into a small town with well laid-out streets. However, in the crisis of 1837-1838, the undertaking virtually collapsed. The dwindling of European immigration and fear of possible rebellion in Sherbrooke and in the region generally reduced the sale of land, a situation not helped by the departure of some colonists, who abandoned their cleared lands to the United States. By 1841, only 400 of a possible 28,000 immigrants had been established in the Cantons de l’Est.[10] The company was faced by a financial crisis since many of those who had purchased land were unable to pay for it within the agreed time. This did not prevent it from buying all the land located on the banks of the Magog River.[11] The company became the exclusive owner of the natural energy from the waterfalls in the river and built mills, factories and dams that it rented to companies on long leases, such as Adam Lomas’s woollen manufactory, the flour-mill belonging to Edward Hale and George Frederick Bowen, and William Brooks’s paper-making firm with its two factories that wanted to establish themselves in the area.

In 1840, the financial problems facing the BALC, which was no longer bringing in anything to its British shareholders, were addressed by Alexander Tilloch Galt, who had worked by the company since 1835. He proposed selling land to carefully selected colonists on credit: for the first ten years, they were expected to pay interest on the loan and only after this when they were established was the capital paid off. He also suggested the company should encourage settlement by more French Canadian and American colonists since they had more experience of pioneering and who had an interest in the long-term development of the area.[12] His proposals were accepted and resulted in greater financial stability for the company. His plan for long-term credit attracted many French Canadians to the area, a process than led to them becoming the largest ethnic group of the early 1860s.[13]

The twelve years that Galt acted as secretary for the BALC in Lower Canada saw major advances in its profitability. This can best be seen in the Sherbrooke Cotton Factory, the first cotton mill in the province and the first joint-stock industrial company to be incorporated in Canada that had been launched with local capital in 1845. Galt personally contributed £500, and when in 1847 the factory was on the verge of bankruptcy, hampered by the constraints of its charter and the inability of numerous small shareholders to pay for their subscribed shares, Galt himself bought back the assets for BALC. With help from Edward Hale and an American manager, Charles Philipps, he started it up again in 1848 by providing more capital and overseeing operations. So successful was he that by 1851 the company was flourishing and he was able to sell it for £3,000. After 1844 Galt also distinguished himself as a railway promoter. Galt’s growing involvement in railway projects and his election as a deputy led to him leaving his post with the BALC in 1856.[14] His replacement as assistant commissioner, Richard William Henecker, remained in post until the beginning of the twentieth century. After 1866, the BALC took a different approach to its lands selling some to industrialists for commercial development.[15]

The BALC’s activities in the 1830s and 1840 resulted in significant British immigration to the area, a process reversed in the 1850s when French Canadians became the dominant immigrant group. The BALC did much towards opening up the country and preparing the way for these settlers, encouraging them by building churches, establishing schools, constructing roads and bridges for their convenience. In addition to developing agriculture in the area through its land sale, the company was also responsible for the creation of an effective system of road communication and established the first important manufacturing industries in the region. Its balance sheet of December 1895 showed that it had disposed of 463,326 acres to settlers.

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[1] Coleman, Thelma, The Canada Company, (County of Perth & Cumming Publishers), 1978, and Karr, Clarence, The Canada Land Company: the early years, an experiment in colonization, 1823-1843, (Ontario Historical Society), 1974, provide the best introduction. Lee, Robert C., The Canada Company and the Huron Tract 1826-1853, (National Heritage), 2004, is especially useful on the Huron Tract.

[2] Ibid, Kesteman, Jean-Pierre, Peter Southam et Diane Saint-Pierre (eds.), Histoire des Cantons de l’est, p. 93.

[3] Ibid, Kesteman, Jean-Pierre, Peter Southam et Diane Saint-Pierre, (eds.), Histoire des Cantons de l’est, p. 95.

[4] DPQ, p. 111.

[5] Montreal Gazette, 19 March 1833.

[6] Archives nationales du Canada, British American Land Company, 1832-1936, pp. 863, 1005.

[7] Though the BALC was not specifically mentioned in the Resolutions, the Patriote position on tenure was made clear in resolutions 56-60.

[8] Ibid, Kesteman, Jean-Pierre, Peter Southam et Diane Saint-Pierre, (eds.), Histoire des Cantons de l’est, p. 211.

[9] Montreal Gazette, 10 December 1833

[10] Skelton, Oscar Douglas, The Life and Times of Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt, (Oxford University Press), 1920, p. 7.

[11] Ibid, Kesteman, Jean-Pierre, Histoire de Sherbrooke Tome I: De l’âge de l’eau à l’ère de la vapeur (1802-1866), p. 162.

[12] Ibid, Skelton, Oscar Douglas, The Life and Times of Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt, pp. 8-9.

[13] Ibid, Skelton, Oscar Douglas, The Life and Times of Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt, p. 13.

[14] DPQ, p. 307.

[15] Ibid, Kesteman, Jean-Pierre, Histoire de Sherbrooke Tome I: De l’âge de l’eau à l’ère de la vapeur (1802-1866), p. 168.

Interpreting urban growth

Transport played an essential role in the development of bigger, functionally more specialised towns from 1830. It was only with the coming of railways and the establishment of a national rail network in the 1840s that a fully integrated urban system developed and the constraints of time and distance that kept all cities apart from London tightly bounded in the early Victorian period were progressively reduced. This profound social revolution led to a period of great change in the structure of the urban system and the extent, characteristics and internal and external relations of cities. The first phase of railway construction confirmed the new regional urban hierarchy of the nineteenth century in its focus on London, the provincial capitals and industrial centres.

Urbanism became more pervasive and individual towns became more populous. In 1831, some 44% of the population of England and Wales and 32% of Scotland’s was urban dwelling. By 1891, the proportions had increased to 75 and 65% respectively. Big towns grew at the expense of the small. In 1830, London was the only ‘million’ city but about one-sixth of Britain’s population lived in large towns of over 100,000. By the 1890s, nearly two-fifths did so and, in addition to London, another five city-regions had over a million people: Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and possibly Leeds. Such regional capitals were major centres of commerce and industrial services. Major ports, such as Liverpool and Glasgow, rivalled and in some activities surpassed London.

There was an increase in the size and number of manufacturing towns. Many were highly specialised. The total number of towns of over 2,500 in England and Wales doubled between 1831 and 1901 from 412 to 895. Up to 1850, the fastest growing towns were in the major manufacturing areas of the industrial revolution, the West Midlands, the Potteries, south Lancashire and west Yorkshire. By 1871, some of the new industrial towns like Cardiff and Middlesborough had almost outstripped slow-growing historic centres such as Chester, York and Exeter. Towards 1900, renewed urban concentration of economic activity led to overspill of great cities into surrounding residential and satellite towns. In parallel, some older centres were revitalised as new industries sought out skilled labour from declining crafts or as shifting values drew industries back to older towns such as Norwich, Coventry, Northampton, Leicester and Derby.

The railways created new towns such as Swindon, Crewe, Ashford and Wolverton, workshops and company headquarters at strategic sites and junctions within their regional system. Rail companies also added new impetus to old-established towns such as Derby, Doncaster and Newton Abbot, while specialist suburbs or satellites focused on railway and engineering works developed at Springburn (Glasgow), Hunslet (Leeds), Gorton (Manchester) and Saltley (Birmingham). Railways also played a key role in the growth of specialist resorts and residential towns.

One level in the urban hierarchy, the small country town lost ground and the percentage of Britain’s population in towns under 10,000 had changed little by the 1890s. Rural depopulation reduced the demand for crafts and services in market and many county towns; cottage industries lost ground to factory production; and increased accessibility by rail to the larger towns reduced the range of shopping and services, leading to a decline of many hitherto thriving little towns. Between 1830 and 1914, Britain became an overwhelmingly urban culture. It led to new ways of living and a range of environmental and governmental problems but it was ad hoc expansion rather than planned growth.

Planning towns

The distinctive tradition of English town planning was not extinguished by industrialisation but it was repressed. When the term ‘town planning’ gained currency in the early part of this century, it emerged as a result of debates in Germany and the USA. The problem with town planning in Britain, today as in the late nineteenth century, was that too many planners thought in one-dimensional terms: architects concentrated on houses, engineers on roads and so on. [1] The need was to co-ordinate people and functions, to complement social and industrial organisation and to produce plans that would permit growth and change. Much of the planned developments of the nineteenth century were largely the work of individuals or individual employers.

Many of the model factories and towns were motivated by feelings of industrial paternalism such as providing adequate housing for the working-classes. Railway centres like Swindon and Crewe found captive workers caged in regulation housing. The enlightened employer had humanitarian, philanthropic and other motives to experiment. Robert Owen‘s New Lanark blended capitalism and paternalism. For the Oldknows, Ashworths and Gregs the motives were more ones of social control. Some model factory villages did involve ideas beyond the utilitarian or disciplinarian. The factory estates outside Bradford and Halifax planned by Titus Salt, Edward Akroyd and Francis Crossley between 1850 and 1870 were essays in urban regeneration. In Somerset the Quaker family of shoemakers, C & J Clark Ltd, built model housing for their workers in the industrial village of Street after production was mechanised in the 1850s. It was in the industrial Midlands and north that the most significant extensions of the tradition were made: Lever’s Port Sunlight in 1888, Cadbury’s Bournville in 1895 and Rowntree‘s New Earswick in 1902.[2] The Garden City was the ideal, the concept of Ebenezer Howard author of Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), reissued in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow.[3] Town and country, Howard argued, must be married in garden cities to enjoy the best of both, with low density housing, green belt and separate industrial and agricultural zones. The result was the first garden city at Letchworth.[4]

Decentralisation of housing, as in the development of suburbia and planning, reflected land values, social forces and cheaper transport. From the 1870s, a growing ‘civic gospel’ began to create progressive municipal involvement in provision and regulation of housing and such amenities as baths, markets, libraries, art galleries and museums, parks and recreation spaces, as well as gas, electricity and, by the late nineteenth century, transport services.[5] This larger social role was a prelude to more interventionist planning principles and policies. By 1900, most large towns were involved in such ‘municipal socialism‘.

The first direct state intervention in town planning per se was the Housing, Town Planning etc Act 1909.[6] It was limited in scope to building and land-use plans for developing peripheral areas of towns and was permissive rather than mandatory. Where enlightened municipal officials, such as Liverpool‘s Chief Engineer James Brodie, and a philosophy of planning (as in the University of Liverpool’s Department and Lever Chair of Civil Design established in 1910) came together the result was a degree of quality of layout of suburbs and roads. But little was achieved before 1918.

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[1] On the development of urban planning see Sutcliffe, A., (ed.), The Rise of Modern Urban Planning 1800-1914, (Mansell), 1981, (Taylor and Francis), 1998, Meller, Helen, Towns, Plans and Society in Modern Britain, (Cambridge University Press), 1997 and Beach, Abigail and Tiratsoo, Nick, ‘The planners and the public’, in ibid, Daunton, Martin J., (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 3: 1840-1950, pp. 525-550 for an invaluable synthesis of recent research. See also, Hardy, Dennis, From garden cities to new towns: campaigning for town and country planning, 1899-1946, (E. & F.N. Spon), 1991.

[2] On Bournville see, Bailey, A.R. and Bryson, J.R., ‘Quaker industrial patronage: George Cadbury and the construction of Bournville model village’, Quaker Studies, Vol. 11, (2006), pp. 96-124 and Harrison, M., Bournville: model village to garden suburb, (Phillimore), 1999.

[3] Ward, Stephen V., ‘Ebenezer Howard: his life and times’, in Parsons, K.C., and Schulyer, David, (eds.), From garden city to green city: the legacy of Ebenezer Howard, (Johns Hopkins University Press), 2002, pp. 14-37 and Meacham, Standish, Regaining paradise: Englishness and the early garden city movement, (Yale University Press), 1998.

[4] Miller, Mervyn, Letchworth: the first garden city, rev. ed., (Phillimore), 2002.

[5] Hill, Kate, Culture and Class in Englsh Public Museums, 1850-1914, (Ashgate), 2005 considers the development of museums as a means of educating the working-classes and the shift from private aristocratic leadership, toward a middle-class civic directorship and a growing professional body of curators as part of the emergence of a dominant urban middle-class culture. See also, Gunn, Simon, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority in the English Industrial City 1840-1914, (Manchester University Press), 2000.

[6] Herbert-Young, Nicholas, ‘Central government and statutory planning under the Town Planning Act, 1909’, Planning Perspectives, Vol. 13, (1998), pp. 341-355.

Suburbanisation

Suburban growth is one of the great features of the nineteenth century.[1] It is possible to identify three phases of suburban growth in this period. First, in the first half of the century improved road communication, by private carriage or public coach, facilitated ribbon development. City merchants built grand villas in picturesque settings along the highways that radiated from the major cities, especially London. Then from the mid-nineteenth century a new wave emerged, aided by the railways, that threatened to engulf exclusive villadom with the lower- and middle-middle-classes. Finally, in the late nineteenth century working-class dormitories threatened the status of suburbia again.

Rathmines Road, Dublin c1890-1910 (NLI, LROY 5953)

Many contemporaries believed the development of suburbia to have spoiled the cities. The suburban dream equalled selfishness, a rejection of the obligation and commitment to the city where the suburbanite earned his living. Suburbs highlighted class distinctions residentially and the core of the cities became depopulated. Suburban development was prompted by a series of factors. First, there was the demographic upsurge. Of particular importance was the expansion of the lower middle-class. Clerks increased from 2.5% of all occupied males in 1851 to over 7% in 1911: a rise from fewer than 150,000 to over 900,000 individuals. Though the composition of the class was varied and the single category concealed a range of character, responsibility and income, the clerk was the butt of snob jokes. [2]

Clapham, once among the most affluent Georgian suburb, remained in the 1860s a citadel of stockbrokers and merchants with easy access to open countryside. By 1900, Clapham was closed in and had deteriorated socially into a clerkly capital. Around provincial cities the same process is evident. Acock’s Green, a village four miles from the centre of Birmingham, became unbearable for the upper middle-classes as it was engulfed by the expanding city. By 1903, it had become, as the Birmingham Daily Mail commented

...abandoned to the smaller house -- the house adapted to the means of the family man of limited income who like to live just outside the artisan belt encircling the city.[3]

There was the ability of people to extend their journey to work. The combination of rising real wages and reduced hours of work by allowing more travelling time were necessary preconditions for the growth of mass suburbs. The presence of a responsive building industry, ready capital and compliant landowners was essential to organise and effect the transfer. There was also the matter of taste. Visions of family privacy and class exclusiveness

There were also certain negative conditions in, for example, the prejudice against apartment building that ensured that English cities expanded outwards rather than upwards. Purpose-built flats for the poor only emerged after it was clear that they could not take advantage of decentralised housing. The need for cheap, central accommodation was undeniable for the poor who needed to be close to possible work. The exception was in the industrial north-east where two-storey flats were commonplace. Generally, relatively low-density housing spilling out of open towns was the norm. City centres were vacated for residential purposes, left to bankers by day and prostitutes by night gave a special tone to these constructions.

Tranquil Vale, Blackheath Village, Blackheath, c1880

Suburbia tended to Conservatism in politics, a counterweight to urban Liberal radicalism and socialist collectivism. [4] Central city and suburban conflict fast replaced the town-country conflict that previously dominated politics. Lord George Hamilton’s election for Middlesex in 1868 is commonly noted as having inaugurated the Conservative trend in suburban south-east England. By 1900, as a party organiser commented to a leading Liberal Lord Rosebery

...as the middle and artisan classes had prospered or acquired their houses they have inclined to the Conservative party because they dread the doctrine which Sidney Webb thinks would be so popular.

The suburban movement represented the beginnings of the gradual move from a society in which most people rented accommodation to one in which many envisaged owning their homes. About 1,500 building societies existed in 1850 but by 1895 there were some 2,600 societies with 600,000 members placed in a statutory basis in 1874 and 1894.[5] In 1914, tenancies remained the norm for 90% of the population. The property-owning democracy was a product of the post-war periods.[6]

The suburbs were much criticised by contemporaries. Walter Besant in 1909 said they were

...without any society; no social gatherings or institutions; as dull a life as mankind ever tolerated....[7]

Yet their benefits were plain. Thousands gained a precious privacy in a home of their own in quiet and healthy surroundings, within reach of the countryside. This is important because the Victorians left open fields that were only this century built upon. Shopping facilities, initially poor, improved dramatically with the displacement of the stall-holder and local craftsmen by the lock-up shop in the 1850s and the emergence of shopping centres in the 1880s containing branches of national retail chains like Boots, Liptons and Freeman, Hardy and Willis.[8] The infrastructure of suburbs was reinforced in other ways with the building of churches, schools, pubs and theatres.

There was also some decentralisation of industrial and business activity, some of which catered entirely for suburban needs: building and repair trades, bakeries and breweries, laundries, gas and electricity works. But lack of space and high rents and rates in city centres were driving other businesses to suburban sites. This development was generally part of the process of evolution of suburban sites. Camberwell, for example, began as a detached village outside London, became a satellite community and was fully absorbed as a suburb.[9]

Railway station in Vincent Road, Woolwich, c1900

By 1900, a majority of its population of 259,000 both lived and worked in Camberwell itself. The extension in railway mileage by 50% between 1870 and 1912, from 13,562 to 20,038 miles, was the consequence of rural branch lines or suburban services. Many railways followed rather than anticipated suburban expansion. The growth in third-class suburban travel was of major importance in London. Outside London the railways were underused by commuters: the Nottingham Suburban Railway opened in 1889 could not withstand the competition of trams and closed in 1916.

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[1] Reeder, D.A., Suburbanity and the Victorian city, (Leicester University Press), 1980 and Bond, Winstan and Divall, Colin, (eds.), Suburbanising the masses: public transport and urban development in historical perspective, (Ashgate), 2003.

[2] Studies of suburbia have often focussed on London; see, for example, Dyos, H.J., Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell, (Leicester University Press), 1966 and Pullen, D.E., Sydenham: from hamlet to suburban town, ( D.E. Pullen), 1974.

[3] Cit, ibid, Waller, P.J., Town, City and Nation, England 1850-1914, p. 148.

[4] Coetzee, Frans, ‘Villa Toryism reconsidered: conservatism and suburban sensibilities in late-Victorian Croydon’, Parliamentary History, Vol. 16, (1997), pp. 29-47 and Roberts, Matthew,’”Villa toryism” and popular conservatism in Leeds, 1885-1902’, Historical Journal, Vol. 49, (2006), pp. 217-246. Moore, J.R., ‘Liberalism and the politics of suburbia: electoral dynamics in late nineteenth-century South Manchester’, Urban History, Vol. 30, (2003), pp. 225-250 gives a Liberal perspective.

[5] See, for example, Pooley, Colin G. and Harmer, Michael J., Property ownership in Britain c. 1850-1950: the role of the Bradford Equitable Building Society and the Bingley Building Society in the development of homeownership, (Granta Editions), 1999 and more generally Johnson, Paul A., Saving and spending: The working-class economy in Britain, 1870-1939, (Oxford University Press), 1985.

[6] See, Daunton, Martin J., A property-owning democracy?: Housing in Britain, (Faber) 1987 for the period after 1900.

[7] Besant, Walter, London in the Nineteenth Century, (A. & C. Black), 1909, p. 262.

[8] See, Lancaster, Bill, The department store: a social history, (Leicester University Press), 1995, Benson, John and Shaw, Gareth, (eds.), The evolution of retail systems, c.1800-1914, (Leicester University Press), 1991 and Chapman, S.D., Jesse Boot of Boots the Chemists: a study in business history, (Hodder & Stoughton), 1974.

[9] Boast, Mary, The story of Camberwell, rev. ed., (Southwark Local Studies Library), 2000.

Nineteenth century seaside towns

New urban developments in the nineteenth century were, in part, the result of expansive capitalism. It is natural that they should excite polemicists. Did they favour some social groups more than others? This needs to be considered against the background of the new urban growths of the late Victorian period: the resort and pleasure towns, the suburban and satellite towns and planned communities of both businessmen and utopians.

John Glover-Kinde issued the song I do like to be beside the seaside in 1909. The most copied artist of mid-nineteenth century England was W.R. Frith whose most popular painting was Ramsgate Sands or Life at the Seaside painted in 1853-1854.

 

By 1911, 55% of English people were visiting the seaside on day excursions and 20% were talking holidays requiring accommodation. The holiday industry involved about 1.25% of the occupied population and 1.5% of consumer expenditure. No previous society gave so many people the chance for a holiday beside the sea.[1]

Seaside resorts were not places of production but of conspicuous expenditure where people wasted time and money: many contemporaries regarded them as parasites. Transport permitted the expansion of coastal resorts and presented each with a problem of how to define and preserve its character. The Kent resorts of Broadstairs, Ramsgate and Margate were popular before the railways arrived owing to cheap fares on the hoys and, after 1815, the Thames steam-packets.[2] Steamboat services had an impact in other areas. From Liverpool after the Napoleonic wars, boats went along the Lancashire, Cheshire and North Wales coastline as well as to the Isle of Man.[3] There were comparable stirrings in the Bristol Channel. Some resorts owed their early expansion to Court connections. George III visited Weymouth in 1784, then almost every August and September from 1789 to 1805.[4] Worthing and Southend were briefly favoured by royal princesses and Brighton undoubtedly owed its expansion to the patronage of the Prince Regent, later George IV.[5]

In the eighteenth century the seaside resort largely took second place to the spa and the appeal of the spas persisted into the nineteenth century.[6] The depression of the 1830s had taken its toll of their prosperity but railway links and individual initiative brought renewed spa development after 1840. In 1841, A.B. Granville identified seventy spas.[7] Tenbury Wells and Droitwich grew as offshoots of John Corbett’s salt-extracting business; Matlock and Buxton revived after the coming of the railway in 1863 and the support of the seventh Duke of Devonshire. There was also municipal investment: Bath Corporation made extensive renovations in the late 1880s and the expansion of Harrogate owed much to the vigorous corporation investment and rivalled some continental spas as an aristocratic and middle-class centre.[8] Spas also developed as locations for fashionable sport or as general tourist centres: Harrogate utilised its proximity to the Yorkshire Dales; Cheltenham promoted general tourism in the Cotswold; Leamington exploited Shakespeare country; Llandrindod Wells brought visitors to Wales.[9]

For recreation, the spas lagged in popularity behind the inland tourist centres and inland tourist centres ran second to seaside resorts. Between 1861 and 1871, the 48 places classified as seaside resorts had grown by 21.5%. Seaside towns were not the same. They catered for different classes of visitors and often combined holiday facilities with other pursuits, usually shipping and fishing. But tourism in some areas thrived and in others barely stirred. The railway reached Cornwall in 1859 but it remained comparatively unexploited until after 1914: it lost population in every decade from 1861 to 1901 and grew only 1.86% between 1901 and 1911. Only one resort in the south-west enticed visitors in any quantity. Torquay’s population quadrupled between 1841 and 1901.[10] It retained some port traffic and well as minor industry but its position as a social centre determined its expansion. Sir Lawrence Palk was active in the 1820s and 1830s in developing Torquay and the arrival of the railway in 1848 was greeted with a town holiday. It was promoted as an autumn and winter resort deliberately to offset the spasmodic conditions of the holiday trade. The late holiday season was largely a middle or upper-class prerogative and to attract this clientele resorts needed to offer both creature comforts and the right tone. New middle-class resorts, like Bournemouth and Eastbourne, were better able to lengthen their seasons, something working-class resorts like Southend[11] and Blackpool could not do. Exclusivity was encouraged. At Folkestone the resident Earls of Radnor were responsible for the new town that emerged on the cliffs to attract genteel society. At Skegness the prime mover was H.V. Tippet, agent of the Earl of Scarborough and Fleetwood commemorated its developer by name.[12]

The history of pleasure resorts is more complicated than that of the middle-class resorts. The outstanding new resort was Blackpool made by the customs of the textile trades: many northern textile towns had their ‘wakes’ (or holiday weeks) when factories closed and the towns emptied for the seaside. [13] In some places the whole town took a rest, as in the July Glasgow Fair when excursion steamers on the Clyde and the railways to the Ayrshire coastal resorts were packed. The turning point was the late 1860s and 1870s. Bank Holidays (under an Act of 1871) gave working-class trippers time for holidays, though legislation to provide a week’s holiday with pay did not come until 1938.

Real wages increased in the 1870s and friendly societies and holiday clubs encouraged the habit of saving, so the prospects of textile workers spending time at the coast increased. The organisation of holidays, some with pay but most without, resulted in the development of block bookings and bargain rates. Blackpool did not discourage middle-class visitors and Lytham St Anne’s offered sanctuary for those affronted by Blackpool’s common side. Blackpool was established as a mecca for entertainment: there were winter gardens, pleasure pavilions, aquarium, music-halls, its three piers, ballrooms and theatres (Frank Matcham created the Grand Theatre in 1894) but its 500 foot imitation Eiffel Tower (1891-1894) was astonishing. Nowhere was everything gathered together, and in such proportions, as at Blackpool.

Blackpool gained a reputation as the premier, not just a plebeian, resort though Brighton vastly exceeded it in size. As an older community, Brighton contained deeper pockets of resistance to the new tourist trends. Blackpool had three times as many lodging-houses and the seaside landlady was very much a creation of Blackpool.[14] But Brighton had three times as many hotels. Brighton resisted the influx of revelling lowborn Londoners and certain residents and hoteliers lobbied the railway companies to limit the number of cheap return tickets to London. It was, however, investment in amenities that turned the plebeian tide or at least stemmed it. Two substantial piers were built in 1866 and 1896 but the principal investment was in baroque hotels in the late nineteenth century to seduce the rich and nouveaux riches from the French Riviera. Royal patronage was essential: first class ticket sales from London to Brighton doubled following the visit of Edward VII in 1909.

There was more to Brighton than grand hotels. In the 1870s, observers commented that both Brighton and Hastings were ‘marine suburbs of London’.[15] Several other resorts qualified as satellites or suburbs. Southport, twenty miles north of Liverpool, is a good example. Connected by rail in 1848, its population rose from 5,000 in 1851 to 48,000 in 1901. Southport had all the trappings of a middle-class holiday centre but it also represented Liverpool wealth by the sea. The second home phenomenon was evident at resorts both inland and coastal. Leeds and Bradford businessmen colonised Scarborough as well as Ilkley and Harrogate. Wealthy Lancashire businessmen settled in the Lake District as well as in Cheshire. This was part of the general movement, temporary and permanent, from big cities.

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[1] Walvin, James, Beside the Sea, (Penguin), 1978 and The English Seaside Resort: A Social History 1750-1914, (Leicester University Press), 1983.

[2] Whyman, John (ed.), The early Kentish seaside (1736-1840): selected documents, (A. Sutton for Kent Archives Office), 1985 and Stafford, Felicity and Yates, Nigel (eds.), The later Kentish seaside (1840-1974): selected documents, (A. Sutton for Kent Archives Office), 1985.

[3] Belchem, John, ‘‘The playground of northern England’: the Isle of Man, Manxness and the northern working class’, in Kirk, Neville, (ed.), Northern identities: historical interpretations of ‘the north’ and ‘northerness’’, (Ashgate), 2000, pp. 71-86; see also, Belchem, John, (ed.), A New History of the Isle of Man, Vol. 5: The Modern Period 1830-1999, (Liverpool University Press), 2000.

[4] Fripp, John, ‘Weymouth over the long eighteenth century: urban renaissance, or new leisure town?’, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, Vol. 129, (2008 for 2007), pp. 49-58.

[5] Farrant, Sue and Farrant, John Howard, ‘Brighton, 1580-1820: from Tudor Town to Regency Resort’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, Vol. 118, (1980), pp. 331-350.

[6] On this issue, see, Hassan, John, The seaside, health and the environment in England and Wales since 1800, (Ashgate), 2003, pp. 15-74.

[7] Granville, A.B., The spas of England, and principal sea-bathing places, 3 Vols. (H. Colburn), 1841. See also, Hembry, Phyllis May, edited and completed by Cowie, Leonard W. and Cowie, Evelyn Elizabeth, British spas from 1815 to the present: a social history, (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), 1997.

[8] See, Walker, H.H. and Neesam, M.G., History of Harrogate under the Improvement Commissioners, 1841-1884, (Manor Place), 1986.

[9] Millward, Roy, ‘Railways and the Evolution of Welsh Holiday Resorts’, 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. 211-224, Yates, Nigel, The Welsh seaside resorts: growth, decline, and survival, (Trivium Publications occasional papers, 1), 2006, Rees, Arfon D., ‘Seaside, Llanelli: a changing landscape’, The Carmarthenshire Antiquary, Vol. 39, (2003), pp. 95-104.

[10] Ibid, Travis, John, The Rise of the Devon Seaside Resorts, 1750-1900 is a good case study.

[11] Yearsley, Ian, A history of Southend, (Phillimore), 2001.

[12] Fletcher, Allan, ‘The role of landowners, entrepreneurs and railways in the urban development of the north Wales coast during the nineteenth century’, Welsh History Review, Vol. 16, (1993), pp. 514-541 provides a good case study.

[13] Walton, John K., Blackpool, (Keele University Press), 1998.

[14] Walton, John K., The Blackpool Landlady: A social history, (Manchester University Press), 1978 and ‘The Blackpool Landlady Revisited’, Manchester Region History Review, Vol. 8, (1994), pp. 23-31.

[15] Smiles, Samuel, The life of George Stephenson and of his son Robert Stephenson: comprising also a history of the invention and introduction of the railway locomotive, (Harper), 1868, p. xviii.

Verchères

Located downstream from Montreal on, the comté de Verchères extends approximately from Varennes to Contrecoeur, enclosed between the southern bank of the St Lawrence and the Richelieu River.[1] In 1837, more than 13,000 people lived there; most had been born in Canada and were Roman Catholics. The population was very young and half were children. The immigrants who lived there came from Great Britain, especially from Ireland. In the early nineteenth century, only Verchères could be called a village but there were small communities of people at Varennes, Contrecoeur, Beloeil and St-Marc. The whole of the territory of the region was on the plains of the valley of the St Lawrence, a vast and fertile area that has particularly sandy soil and is well supplied with water. Two-thirds of the land was devoted to agriculture, mainly oats and potato and the remainder was uncultivated lands. Animal breeding was widespread especially sheep and cattle. The undeveloped areas produced wood of average quality, except in Beloeil where there was beech, maple and birch. Two principal routes crossed the comté: one skirted the St Lawrence, the other the Richelieu. Religious observance was particularly strong in the region and by 1837 all the parishes had a stone church. Bouchette, among others, was surprised by the devotion of the habitants of Varennes and commented that their church exceeded those in the surrounding seigneuries in terms of its beauty.[2] There were, however, few other public buildings.

In Verchères the small, prosperous and politically committed elite sometimes supported the loyalist position but were more often committed to the Patriote cause. The Crown was supported by the religious and seigneurial elite in the comté. The curés of Verchères and of Varennes, René-Olivier Bruneau and Charles-Joseph Primeau, used all their power to try and stop the agitation in the autumn of 1837. Primeau was especially viewed with suspicion and was seen by some as an ‘enemy of his parishioners’ and even as an informer.[3] Curés, seigneurs, several professionals, especially the merchant of Varennes, Aignan-Aimé Massue, formed the basis of a loyalist coalition in the area.[4] However, it was the Patriote cause that gained more adherents. At Contrecoeur, Patriotes were led by doctor A. C. Lenoblet Duplessis, Cormier, a militia captain and even the curé, who refused to take his monetary dues from his parishioners to allow them to recover from economic stagnation in 1838. At Beloeil, the Patriotes were led by the blacksmith Jean-Baptiste Dufresne, who gathered and repaired weapons and the merchant Prudent Malot. [5] Varennes provided three important figures in the rebellions: doctor Eugène-Napoléon Duchesnois[6], Amury Girod[7] and Ludger Duvernay, born in Verchères. Finally, the reformist cause was supported by the two representations of the comté in the Legislative Assembly: Pierre Amiot[8], a prosperous farmer from Varennes and Joseph-Toussaint Drolet[9], merchant of Saint-Marc.

The Patriote attitudes of the comté and especially its attacks on the functioning of colonial government resulted in the holding of public assemblies. On 7 May and 27 December 1827, the first assemblies were held to attack the policies of Dalhousie and the Legislative Council. [10] There were further assemblies at Saint-Charles on 7 October 1830 and 30 July 1832 in which the Patriote elite from Verchères played a central role. During the winter of 1833-1834, the Patriotes of Verchères formed their own organisation. Amury Girod, who lived in Varennes made several speeches of which one attacked the position of the church.[11] He was also present at the assembly on 6 January 1834 that formed a comité central to correspond with that in Montreal. [12] Three months later on 3 April, the habitants of the comté met to ratify the Ninety-Two Resolutions that had just been written at Contrecoeur.[13] On May 15 1837, a large assembly was held at Saint-Marc in Verchères to protest at the rejection of the Ninety-Two Resolutions by the British government and called for the boycott of British goods and the introduction of a system of smuggling to deny customs revenue to the authorities.[14] The comté de Verchères was the only comté to specify what the political principles of a government controlled by the Parti Patriote would be.[15] Despite the intense agitation of the 1830s, there was no fighting between habitants and the British army in 1837 in the region. This occurred largely because the more radical Patriotes in the comté, including the deputies Amiot and Drolet, his son, Alexandre[16], Lenoblet Duplessis, Duchesnois, Joseph Dansereau[17], Étienne Gauvreau[18], Paul Lussier[19] and Pierre Ménard[20] went to the neighbouring villages of Saint-Denis and Saint-Charles, the main centres of Patriote resistance in the Richelieu.

---

[1] Ibid, Bouchette, Joseph, Description topographique du Canada 1815, pp. 201-203.

[2] Ibid, Bouchette, Joseph, Description topographique du Canada 1815, p. 203.

[3] Filion, Mario, Album souvenir du tricentenaire de la paroisse Ste-Anne de Varennes, 1692-1992, (Shawinigan, Publicité Pâquet inc.), 1991, p. 35; ibid, Laporte, Gilles, Patriotes et Loyaux, pp. 328-340.

[4] Audet, Françis-Joseph, Varennes: notes pour servir à l’histoire de la seigneurie, (Éditions des dix), 1943, p. 25

[5] Ibid, Lambert, Pierre, Les Patriotes de Beloeil: le mouvement patriote, les insurrections de 1837-1838 et les paroissiens de Beloeil, pp. 18-25

[6] Messier, p. 162.

[7] Messier, p. 212.

[8] DPQ, p. 7; Messier, pp. 6-7.

[9] DPQ, pp. 236-237; Messier, p. 158.

[10] Ibid, Lambert, Pierre, Les Patriotes de Beloeil: le mouvement patriote, les insurrections de 1837-1838 et les paroissiens de Beloeil, p. 14

[11] Le Canadien, 25 April 1834.

[12] Le Canadien, 13 January 1834.

[13] Le Canadien, 25 April 1834.

[14] Ibid, Bernard, Jean-Paul, Assemblées publiques, résolutions et déclarations de 1837-1838, pp. 38-41.

[15] Ibid, Lambert, Pierre, Les Patriotes de Beloeil: le mouvement patriote, les insurrections de 1837-1838 et les paroissiens de Beloeil, p. 29

[16] Messier, p. 157.

[17] Messier, p. 131.

[18] Messier, p. 206.

[19] Messier, p. 311.

[20] Messier, p. 334.

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

---

[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