Disease in the Victorian city: extended version

Bad housing, poor sanitation and overcrowding, that in turn bred epidemic disease, were closely associated with inner-city areas. Ursula Henriques wrote:

In the first half of the nineteenth century no aspect of life suffered such cumulative deterioration as did public health. [1]

It was unhealthy to live in Victorian cities, though chances of illness and premature death varied considerably depending on who you were, where you lived, how much you earned and how well you were fed. Social class mattered. Not all towns had equally high mortality rates and death rates in the countryside could match those in middle-class suburban areas of cities.[2]

Contemporary opinion was most concerned about infectious diseases even though more people died from ‘other causes’ than from all infectious diseases combined.[3] Such diseases as typhus and influenza were both endemic and epidemic: they killed large numbers of both rural and urban dwellers but affected the young and malnourished of the urban slums. Smallpox became less important, in part because of the vaccination developed by Edward Jenner in the 1790s though it was not eradicated.[4] Typhus fever was endemic in London and epidemics occurred in all towns in 1817-1819, 1826-1827 and 1831-1832.[5] Influenza epidemics occurred in 1803 and 1831. As towns grew, polluted water became an increasingly pressing problem and was the cause of many diseases from infantile diarrhoea and typhoid fever and especially cholera.[6]

Nothing occupies a nation’s mind with the subject of health like a general contagion. In the 1830s and the 1840s, there were three massive waves of contagious disease: the first, from 1831 to 1833, included two influenza epidemics and the initial appearance of cholera; the second, from 1836 to 1842, included major epidemics of influenza, typhus, typhoid and cholera. As Garrison observed, epidemics in the eighteenth century were ‘more scattered and isolated’ than previously and in the early nineteenth century there had been a marked decline in such illnesses as diphtheria and influenza.[7] Smallpox, the scourge of the eighteenth century, appeared to be controllable by the new practice of vaccination. Then, in the mid-1820s, England saw serious outbursts of smallpox and typhus, anticipating the pestilential turbulence of the next two decades.

The first outbreak of Asiatic cholera in Britain was at Sunderland during the autumn of 1831. From there the disease made its way north into Scotland and south toward London eventually claiming 52,000 lives.[8] It had taken five years to cross Europe from its point of origin in Bengal and by 1831 British doctors were well aware of its nature, if not its cause. The progress of the illness in a cholera victim was a frightening spectacle: diarrhoea increased in intensity and became accompanied by painful retching; thirst and dehydration; severe pain in the limbs, stomach and abdominal muscles; a change skin hue to a sort of bluish-grey. The disease was unlike anything then known. One doctor recalled

Our other plagues were home-bred, and part of ourselves, as it were; we had a habit of looking at them with a fatal indifference, indeed, inasmuch as it led us to believe that they could be effectually subdued. But the cholera was something outlandish, unknown, monstrous; its tremendous ravages, so long foreseen and feared, so little to be explained, its insidious march over whole continents, its apparent defiance of all the known and conventional precautions against the spread of epidemic disease, invested it with a mystery and a terror which thoroughly took hold of the public mind, and seemed to recall the memory of the great epidemics of the middle ages.[9]

Cholera subsided as rapidly as it had begun, but another sort of devastation had already taken hold. The previous June, following a particularly rainy spring, Britain experienced the first of eight serious influenza epidemics that occurred over the next sixteen years. The disease was often fatal, and even when it did not kill, it left its victims weakened against other diseases. Burials in London doubled during the first week of the 1833 outbreak; in one two-week period they quadrupled. Whereas cholera, spread by contaminated water, affected mainly the poorer neighbourhoods, influenza was not limited by economic or social boundaries. Large numbers of public officials, especially in the Bank of England, died from it, as did many theatre people.

In the 1830s, the term ‘fever’ included a number of different diseases, among them cholera and influenza and a ‘new fever’, typhus was isolated. During its worst outbreak, in 1837-1838, most of the deaths from fever in London were attributed to typhus and new cases averaged about 16,000 in England in each of the following four years. This coincided with one of the worst smallpox contagions, which killed thousands, mainly infants and children. Scarlet fever or scarlatina was responsible for nearly 20,000 deaths in 1840 alone.[10]

Although mortality rates for specific diseases were not compiled for England and Wales between 1842 and 1846, during this period there was a considerable decline in epidemics. It has been suggested that one reason was the expansion of railway building, with the consequent increase in wage levels and a better standard of living. A hot, dry summer in 1846, however, was followed by a serious outbreak of typhoid in the fall of that year. Enteric fever, as it was then called, is a water-borne disease like cholera and tends to flourish where sources of drinking water are infected. That same year, as the potato famine struck Ireland, a virulent form of typhus appeared, cutting down large numbers of even well-to-do families. Irish workers moved to cities like Liverpool and Glasgow and the ‘Irish fever’ moved with them. By 1847, the contagion, not all of it connected with immigration, had spread throughout England and Wales, accounting for over 30,000 deaths. As had happened a decade earlier, typhus occurred simultaneously with a severe influenza epidemic that killed almost 13,000. Widespread dysentery and cholera returned in the autumn of 1848, affecting especially those parts of the island hardest hit by typhus and leaving about as many dead as it had in 1831.[11]

Diseases such as cholera, typhus, typhoid and influenza were more or less endemic, erupting into epidemics when the right climatic conditions coincided with periods of economic distress. The frequency of concurrent epidemics gave rise to the belief that one sort of disease brought on another; indeed, it was widely believed that influenza was an early stage of cholera. There were other contagions, however, that yearly killed thousands without becoming epidemic. Taken together, measles and ‘hooping cough’ accounted for 50,000 deaths in England and Wales between 1838 and 1840, and about a quarter of all deaths during this general period have been attributed to tuberculosis or consumption.

Generally throughout the 1830s and the 1840s, trade was depressed and food prices were high. The poorer classes, often underfed, were less resistant to contagion. Also, during the more catastrophic years the weather was extremely variable, with heavy rains following prolonged droughts. Population, especially in the Midlands and in some seaport cities and towns, was growing rapidly without a parallel expansion in new housing and over-crowding contributed to the relatively fast spread of disease.

The Registrar General reported in 1841 that while mean life expectancy in Surrey was forty-five years, it was only thirty-seven in London and twenty-six in Liverpool. The average age of ‘labourers, mechanics, and servants’, at times of death was only fifteen. Mortality figures for crowded districts like Shoreditch, Whitechapel, and Bermondsey were typically half again or twice as high as those for middle-class areas of London. Such statistics made people aware of the magnitude of disease, but also served as effective weapons for sanitary reformers when they brought their case before Parliament. Two reports by the Poor Law Commission in 1838, one by Dr. Southwood Smith[12], the other by Doctors Neil Arnott and J.P. Kay, outlined causes and probable means of preventing communicable disease in poverty areas like London’s Bethnal Green and Whitechapel. Chadwick’s Sanitary Report in 1842 broadened the scope of inquiry geographically, as did a Royal Commission report in 1845 on the Health of Towns and Populous Places.

During the first decades of Victoria’s reign, baths were virtually unknown in the poorer districts and uncommon anywhere. Most households of all economic classes still used ‘privy-pails’; water closets were rare. Sewers had flat bottoms, and because drains were made out of stone, seepage was considerable. If, as was often the case in towns, streets were unpaved, they might remain ankle-deep in mud for weeks. For new middle-class homes in the growing manufacturing towns, elevated sites were usually chosen, with the result that sewage filtered or flowed down into the lower areas where the labouring populations lived. Some towns had special drainage problems. In Leeds, for example, the Aire River, fouled by the town’s refuse, flooded periodically, sending noxious waters into the ground floors and basements of the low-lying houses. As Chadwick later recalled, the new dwellings of the middle-class families were scarcely healthier, for the bricks tended to preserve moisture. Even picturesque old country houses often had a dungeon-like dampness, as a visitor could observe:

If he enters the house he finds the basement steaming with water-vapour; walls constantly bedewed with moisture, cellars coated with fungus and mould; drawing rooms and dining rooms always, except in the very heat of summer, oppressive from moisture; bedrooms, the windows of which are, in winter, so frosted on their inner surface, from condensation of water in the air of the room, that all day they are coated with ice.[13]

In some districts of London and the great towns the supply of water was irregular. Typically, a neighbourhood of twenty or thirty families on a particular square or street would draw their water from a singly pump two or three times a week. Sometimes, finding the pump not working, they were forced to reuse the same water. When a local supply became contaminated the results could be disastrous. In Soho’s St. Anne’s parish, for example, the faeces of an infant stricken with cholera washed down into the water reserve from which the local pump drew and almost all those using the pump were infected. Millbank Prison, taking its water from the sewage-polluted Thames, suffered greatly during every epidemic of water-borne disease.

Since it was widely believed that disease was generated spontaneously from filth (pythogenesis) and transmitted by noxious invisible gas or miasma, there was much alarm over the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858 and 1859.[14] The Thames had become so polluted with waste as to be almost unbearable during summer months. People refused to use the river-steamers and would walk miles to avoid crossing one of the city bridges. Parliament could carry on its business only by hanging disinfectant-soaked cloths over the windows. It should have been a blow to miasma theory when no outbreak of fever followed from this monstrous stench.

As late as 1873, however, William Budd[15] could reluctantly report in his important book on typhoid that ‘organic matter, and especially sewage in a state of decomposition, without any relation to antecedent fever, is still generally supposed to be the most fertile source.’ [16] Resistance to the theory of polluted water as a source of infection contributed to the incidence of typhoid in the second half of the century as well as to the high mortality rates from cholera in epidemics as late as 1854 or 1865-1866.[17] The general cleaning up of the cities and towns, however, produced a marked reduction in deaths from typhus, a disease transmitted by lice. Although a systematic control of contagious disease had to await the introduction of preventive inoculation in the 1880s and 1890s, after mid-century the general health of the country measurably improved.[18]

For much of the century, doctors were confused about the causes, course and treatment of the disease. The unpredictable behaviour of the severe contagions also intensified anxiety. They would appear, perhaps then subside for a month or two, only to reappear in the same locality or somewhere else. The individual sufferer had no way of predicting the outcome of the disease in his own case. Influenza patients, observed the London Medical Gazette during the 1833 epidemic, ‘might linger for the space of two or three weeks and then get up well, or they might die in the same number of days.’[19] Just as frightening was the uncertain progress of typhoid. Infectious diseases were spatially concentrated: deaths from tuberculosis, typhus and cholera focused mainly on inner-city slum districts. The main nineteenth century killer of adults was tuberculosis. Few families were untouched by its effects and even in 1900 it was responsible for around 10% of all deaths nationally, despite a significant decline since 1850. Spread by a bacillus through droplet infection from coughs or saliva, tuberculosis is not highly contagious but its spread is encouraged by a combination of poverty, malnutrition and overcrowded living conditions. Though not immune, the middle-classes were better able to withstand tuberculosis than the poor, malnourished working-class. [20]

The number of victims of chronic food poisoning was also significant. Mineral poisons were often introduced into food and water from bottle stoppers, lead water pipes and wall paints or equipment used to process food and beverages. Moreover, the deliberate adulteration of food was a common and, until 1860, virtually unrestricted practice. For example, because of the Englishman’s dislike for brown bread, bakers regularly whitened their flour with alum. In 1858, a Bradford sweetshop owner ordered a delivery of plaster of Paris that was commonly used to adulterate sugar but a novice supplied arsenic instead. It went on sale in a batch of peppermint drops and within a few days 20 people were dead and hundreds seriously ill.[21]

The Use of Adulteration. Little Girl, ‘If you please, Sir, Mother says, will you let her have a quarter of a pound of your best tea to kill the rats with, and an ounce of chocolate as would get rid of the black beatles!’ Dated August 1855.

Conditions for the processing and sale of foods were unsanitary. An 1863 report to the Privy Council stated that one-fifth of the meat sold came from diseased cattle or had died of pleuro-pneumonia and anthacid or anthracoid diseases.[22] In 1860, the first pure-food act was passed, but, as was often the case in these early regulatory measures, it provided no mandatory system of enforcement. [23] In 1872, further legislation was passed considerably strengthening penalties and inspection procedures. Cow’s milk, was perhaps the most widely adulterated food. In 1877, a quarter of all the milk examined by the Local Government Board was seriously adulterated; in 1882, one-fifth of the 20,000 milk analyses made by the 52 county and 172 borough analysts was adulterated. Not until 1894 was the Local Government Board able to report that adulterated milk accounted for less than 10% of all samples. However, throughout most of the nineteenth century, Britons had little protection against unwholesome food and drink.

What was the impact of such high rates of infectious disease? Death was only one, and not necessarily the most important, of the many effects of disease. For a poor family struggling to pay rent and buy food, illness (whether fatal or not) imposed additional strains: medical bills to pay; medicines to buy; extra heating costs; and the problem of childcare if the mother was taken ill. If the primary wage-earner was off work the crisis would be more acute as not only did outgoings rise but incomes also fell. Short-term crises were met by pawning clothes, borrowing from kin and raising short-term loans. Prolonged illness increased costs and reduced income to such an extent that it could cause or increased malnutrition for the whole family, leading to further illness or to eviction for non-payment of rent. Families might then have to move to inferior accommodation or to be separated from one another in the workhouse. There is little doubt that the high level and concentration of infectious disease was a significant extra burden for working-class families in the Victorian city.

In certain respects, the health of the urban population began to improve as a result of a number of changes occurring after 1890. General increases in standards of living and especially improvements in diet and nutrition led to greater resistance to disease and lower mortality. Advances in medical knowledge and technology began to make real inroads into diseases that had been barely understood in 1830. The development of a state welfare policy towards health created a buffer that prevented some of the worst impacts of disease in family life though the impact of the embryonic welfare state was patchy before 1914. The Public Health Act 1890 was more effective than previous legislation in ensuring that towns took responsibility for the basic provision of pure water supply and proper sanitary conditions. The Housing Act 1890 placed emphasis on slum clearance but this only had a limited effect by 1914. The development of town planning began to stress environmental considerations that influenced the layout of some suburban developments and created a healthier environment. This only had an effect if individuals were able to move from the inner-city areas to the new garden suburbs. While there had been some improvement in the quality of life for those living in urban communities between 1830 and 1914, the major determinant of health remained social class with the working-class generally less healthy than the middle-classes.

---

[1] Henriques, U., Before the Welfare State: Social administration in early industrial Britain, (Longman), 1979, p. 117.

[2] On health see Howe, G.M., Man, environment and disease in Britain, (Penguin), 1976 and Woods, R. and Woodward, J., (eds.), Urban disease and mortality in nineteenth-century England, (Batsford), 1984. Ibid, Smith, F.B., The People’s Health 1830-1910 is a valuable study of social problems and the limited resources of nineteenth century medicine. Youngson, A.J., The Scientific Revolution in Victorian Medicine, (Croom Helm), 1979 is useful on medical developments.

[3] Brown, Michael, ‘From Foetid Air to Filth: The Cultural Transformation of British Epidemiological Thought, ca. 1780-1848’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 82, (2008), pp. 515-544, Condrau, Flurin and Worboys, Michael, ‘Epidemics and Infections in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Social History of Medicine, Vol. 20, (2007), pp. 147-158 and Mooney, Graham, ‘Infectious Diseases and Epidemiologic Transition in Victorian Britain? Definitely’, Social History of Medicine, Vol. 20, (2007), pp. 595-606.

[4] Hardy, A., ‘Smallpox in London: factors in the decline of the disease in the nineteenth century’, Medical History, Vol. 27, (1983), pp. 111-138. See also, Brunton, Deborah, The politics of vaccination: practice and policy in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, 1800-1874, (University of Rochester Press), 2008.

[5] Hardy, A., ‘Urban famine or urban crisis? Typhus in the Victorian city’, Medical History, Vol. 32, (1988), pp. 401-425.

[6] On cholera, see, Hamlin, Christopher, Cholera: The Biography, (Oxford University Press), 2009 is a valuable global study. Longmate, N., King Cholera, (Hamish Hamilton), 1966, Morris, R.J., Cholera, 1832, (Croom Helm), 1976, Pelling, M., Cholera, Fever and English Medicine 1825-1865, (Oxford University Press), 1977, Durey, Michael, The Return of the Plague: British Society and Cholera 1831-2, (Gill and Macmillan), 1979 and Gilbert, Pamela K., Cholera and nation: doctoring the social body in Victorian England, (State University of New York Press), 2008. Hardy, A., ‘Cholera, quarantine and the English preventive system, 1850-1895’, Medical History, Vol. 37, (1993), pp. 250-269 looks at later developments.

[7] Garrison, F.H., An introduction to the history of medicine: with medical chronology, bibliographic data, and test questions, 2^nd ed., (W. B. Saunders Company), 1913, p. 334.

[8] On the impact of 1831-1832 outbreak on localities see, Hardiman, Sue, The 1832 cholera epidemic and its impact on the city of Bristol, (Historical Association, Bristol Branch), 2005, Kidd, Alan J. and Wyke, Terry J., ‘The cholera epidemic in Manchester 1831-32’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Vol. 87, (2005), pp. 43-56, O’Neill, Timothy P., ‘Cholera in Offaly in the 1830s’, Offaly Heritage, Vol. 1, (2003), pp. 96-107 and Walker, Martyn., ‘The 1832 cholera epidemic in the east midlands’, East Midland Historian, Vol. 1-2 (1991-2), pp. 7-14.

[9] Gairdner, William, T., Public health in relation to air and water, (Edmonston and Douglas), 1862, pp. 15-16.

[10] See, Duncan, C.J., Duncan, S.R. and Scott, S.,’ The dynamics of scarlet fever epidemics in England and Wales in the 19^th century’, Epidemiology and Infection, Vol. 117, (1996), pp. 493-499.

[11] On local effects of the 1848-1849 cholera epidemic see, Haines, Gary., ‘Cholera and Bethnal Green in 1849’, East London History Society Newsletter, Vol. 2, (3), (2002), pp. 20-24, Thomas, Amanda J., The Lambeth Cholera Outbreak of 1848-1849: The Setting, Causes, Course and Aftermath of an Epidemic in London, (McFarland & Co Inc), 2009, Cochrane, Margaret Ruth and Cochrane, Robert Evan, Death comes to Hedon: the cholera epidemic of 1849, (Highgate), 1993, James, D.C., ‘The cholera epidemic of 1849 in Cardiff’, Morgannwg, Vol. 25, (1981), pp. 164-179 and Lloyd, T.H., ‘The cholera epidemic of 1849 in Leamington Spa and Warwick’, Warwickshire History, Vol. 2, (1973), pp. 16-32.

[12] See Lewes, Gertrude Hill, Dr. Southwood Smith; a retrospect, (Blackwood), 1898 and Webb, R.K., ‘Southwood Smith: The Intellectual Sources of Public Service’, in Porter, Dorothy and Porter, Roy, (eds.), Doctors, Politics and Society: Historical Essays, (Ropodi), 1993, pp. 46-80.

[13] Chadwick, Edwin, The General History of the Principles of Sanitation, (Cassell and Company), 1889, p. 10.

[14] On this, see, Halliday, Stephen, The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the cleansing of the Victorian capital, (Sutton), 1999.

[15] Dunnill, Michael S., Dr William Budd: Bristol’s most famous physician, (Redcliffe), 2006.

[16] Cit, Gaw, Jerry L., “A time to heal”: the diffusion of Listerism in Victorian Britain, (Diane Publishing), 1999, p. 24.

[17] There are fewer studies on the later outbreaks of cholera but see, for example, Roberts, Glynne, ‘“Closing the stable door after the horse has bolted”: preventing the spread of smallpox and cholera in Caernarfonshire, 1870-1910’, Transactions of the Caernarvonshire Historical Society, Vol. 55, (1994), pp. 109-128, Callcott, M., ‘The challenge of cholera: the last epidemic at Newcastle upon Tyne’, Northern History, Vol. 20, (1984), pp. 167-186 and Luckin, W., ‘The final catastrophe: cholera in London, 1866’, Medical History, Vol. 21, (1977), pp. 32-42.

[18] Vaccination and inoculation remained contentious issues throughout the nineteenth century and there was an anti-vaccination movement as well as parental resistance to compulsion. On this see, Durbach, Nadja, Bodily matters: the anti-vaccination movement in England, 1853-1907, (Duke University Press), 2005.

[19] Cit, Thompson, Theophilus, Annals of influenza or epidemic catarrhal fever in Great Britain from 1510 to 1837, (Sydenham Society), 1852, p. 289.

[20] Smith, Francis Barrymore, The retreat of tuberculosis, 1850-1950, (Croom Helm), 1988.

[21] Ibid, Whorton, James C., The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain was Poisoned at Home, Work and Play, pp. 139-141.

[22] See, Waddington, Keir, The bovine scourge: meat, tuberculosis and public health, 1850-1914, (Boydell & Brewer), 2006.

[23] Collins, E.J.T., ‘Food adulteration and food safety in Britain in the 19^th and 20^th centuries’, Food Policy, Vol. 18, (1993), pp. 95-109 provides a useful overview.

Organising towns

History, as A.J.P. Taylor reminded us, gets ‘thicker’ as it approaches modern times

There are more people, more events, and more is written about them. [1]

Social history gets particularly ‘thick’ because more attention is paid to the lives of ordinary people, more of them were literate and more join the debate. There is a flood of evidence for urban conditions in this period: reports, Blue Books, surveys, memoranda, diaries, books.[2] So what were urban conditions like in the 1830s? In what ways did those conditions change in the next eighty years and why?[3]

Although Dale Porter[4], like Anthony Wohl and other social historians, paints a grim picture of London’s environmental contamination, absence of adequate sanitation, and lack of viable solutions to problems caused by human, animal, and industrial waste, following Olson, he also asks the pointed question, how filthy was London actually? Cleanliness is in the eye of the beholder, and there is a difference between the dismal levels of sanitation and public health that historians perceive in hindsight and how most contemporaries perceived them.

A Court For King Cholera. One of Punch’s most famous images of the Nineteenth-century slum, drawn by John Leech, and published in 1852.

Late Georgian London was generally considered clean and healthy by most people. Olsen cited evidence that visitors to London before 1830 were quite pleased by the healthy climate and sanitation of the capital.[5] He speculated that London’s early Victorian reputation for filthiness stemmed most directly from the totally unexpected and shockingly swift cholera epidemic of 1832. This threw the medical profession into a panic, for no one could explain what cholera was, let alone how to prevent it. Its horrifying symptoms and devastating mortality led the public and the media to over-dramatise its actual impact. Although cholera returned in 1848, in 1853, and in 1866, each time prompting cries for pollution control it actually killed fewer people than probably any other epidemic infection. John Snow’s famous demonstration of the waterborne nature of the disease was not accepted until after the last of these epidemics.[6] In other words, like the development of ideas of Victorian ideas of the public interest and pollution, both so crucial in late-nineteenth-century conceptions of class, sexuality, gender, and the effects of literature and the arts, the filth of London proves part verifiable fact and part a cultural response to the practical problem of cholera.

By the 1830s, the administrative and electoral map of Britain was at odds with its demographic and economic structures. The antiquated legal structure of local government created three major sets of problems for urban government. First, urban status was often unrelated to contemporary size and function. Major cities, such as Manchester and the east Lancashire cotton towns and the Black Country industrial centres, were without formal status. Manchester and Birmingham, for example, were unincorporated in the eighteenth century and, in theory, controlled by the county authorities. [7] Although they gained control over their own affairs through local Improvement Acts the system did not lend itself to effective local government. Unincorporated industrial towns had no direct representation in Parliament and found it difficult to petition for change. In contrast, many decayed towns had parliamentary representation, for example the rotten borough of Old Sarum, or had a handful of inhabitants in the ‘pocket’ of aristocratic landowners and retained borough status. London‘s metropolitan area of some eight-mile radius from St Paul’s had a population of 1.75 million in 1831 but lacked a coherent overall administrative structure.

Even where urban administrations were in place in large towns, as in incorporated boroughs as at Liverpool, Bristol, Newcastle and Kingston upon Hull, their urban built-up areas were often tightly restricted in terms of continuing expansion. Incorporated towns also varied greatly in the way in which local government was organised. ‘Closed’ corporations such as Leeds, Liverpool, Coventry, Bath and Leicester were often run by a small oligarchy appointed for life. This led to the third problem. What effective control was there of a range of physical, environmental, health, economic and social issues that often affected areas outside existing corporation boundaries? Thus, although London‘s parish vestries sought to provide better sanitation and health their efforts lacked integration. Despite the work of Improvement Commissioners in larger English cities, there were severe limitations to the range of their activities. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that local government was slow to respond to the increasingly serious problems of urban life until after 1835.[8]

Between the 1830s and 1890s, urban and local government was restructured twice and there was significant parliamentary legislation on specific urban problems, together with a restructuring of the franchise and of parliamentary and civic representation. [9] Parliamentary franchise was widened in 1832, 1867 and 1884-1885 creating a more equal relationship between parliamentary representation and property ownership and population size and increased the urban voice in national affairs. The Municipal Corporations Act 1835, and parallel legislation in Scotland in 1833 and 1834, laid the basis for municipal planning and control over a wide range of issues and recognised the true administrative map of urban Britain by giving full urban status to many unincorporated towns.[10] Some, such as Manchester, Birmingham and Sheffield, were already very large; others such as Bradford, Bolton, Huddersfield, Wolverhampton and Brighton were growing rapidly. They also allowed the incorporation of adjacent townships over which urban development had spread, as reflected in the considerable boundary extensions of Liverpool and Leeds and of Glasgow in the 1830s. The 1835 Act did not solve the problem of integrating urban government. Intervention through bye-laws in key issues such as health and sanitation, housing, public amenities, poverty was either piecemeal or, as in the case of the Poor Law and the provision of compulsory state education (made over to local government in 1919 and 1902 respectively) was reserved for central government. When new administrative divisions were established they were often out of tune with the times. For example, the reformed Poor Law of 1834 created a framework of 624 Unions focused on old market towns and regional centres, a pre-industrial pattern of functional regionalism that had to be constantly adjusted to meet changing population distribution. By the 1860s, there was a growing recognition that urban administration needed to be more coherent if it was to implement legislation on health, housing and sanitation. In 1855, the Metropolitan Management Act, following the Royal Commission of 1854 attempted to create an integrated government for London by reorganising the previously haphazard structure into a Metropolitan Board to control sewage, highways, lighting and health in London’s 36 Registration Districts with an 1861 population of 2.8 million. [11]

Elsewhere, despite the addition of 554 new urban areas between 1848 and 1868 in England and Wales, confusion remained. A Royal Commission to investigate local government was set up in 1869 and its Second Report began the transition to the Acts of 1888 and 1894 that established the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century framework of local government. The Public Health Act 1872 created an administrative framework of Urban and Rural Sanitary Districts under the Local Government Board set up the previous year. The Local Government Act 1875 and the Municipal Corporations Acts 1882 defined the principles and functions of a new system of urban administration. However, the Commissioners of the Board set up under the Local Government Boundaries Act 1887 and the decisions made under the Local Government Acts of 1888 and 1894 determined its geography. These Acts recognised that the needs of large towns could best be met by integrating all the functions of local government within all-purpose administrations of 63 Counties and 61 County Boroughs. London became an Administrative County incorporating its 41 Metropolitan Board Areas. In 1894, the remaining urban areas were consolidated into Municipal Boroughs and Urban Districts each with a range of powers but subordinate to their Administrative Counties for education, police and fire and some other services.

---

[1] Taylor, A.J.P., English History 1914-1945, (Oxford University Press), 1965, page 729.

[2] On  urban  conditions and the problems of public health  see  Wohl, A.S., Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain, (Methuen), 1985 and  his The  eternal slum: housing and social policy  in  Victorian London, (Edward Arnold), 1986. Walvin, J., English Urban Life 1776-1851, (Hutchinson), 1984 is an excellent, readable study on the early years of the period. Fraser, D., (ed.), Municipal reform and the Industrial city, (Leicester University Press), 1982 contains useful case studies.  Porter, R., Disease, Medicine and Society in England 1550-1860, (Macmillan), 2^nd. ed., 1993 contains some useful ideas in its final chapters. Mort, Frank, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830, (Routledge), 1987, 2^nd ed., (Routledge), 1999 examines the impact of disease on perceptions of women. Smith, F.B., The People’s Health 1830-1910, (Croom Helm), 1979 is a valuable study of social problems and the limited resources of nineteenth century medicine.

[3] Luckin, Bill, ‘Pollution in the city’, in ibid, Daunton, Martin J., (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 3: 1840-1950, pp. 207-228.

[4] Porter, Dale H., The Thames Embankment: Environment, Technology, and Society in Victorian London, (University of Akron Press), 1998.

[5] Olsen, D.J., The growth of Victorian London, (Batsford), 1976, pp. 330-331.

[6] Snow, John, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, (John Churchill), 1855. See also, Hempel, Sandra, The Medical Detective: John Snow, Cholera and the Mystery of the Broad Street Pump, (Granta), 2007 and Vinten-Johansen, Peter, Brody, Howard, Paneth, Nigel and Rachman, Stephen, Cholera, Chloroform and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow, (Oxford University Press), 2003.

[7] There was an important distinction between incorporated and unincorporated towns. Incorporated towns or boroughs had received charters, often in the Middle Ages, which gave them certain rights. In particular they were run by elected corporations. Unincorporated towns were still run by the parish or by the old feudal leet courts.

[8] Hennock, E.P., ‘Urban Sanitary Reform a Generation before Chadwick?’, Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 10, (1), (1957), pp. 113-120 provides a useful discussion of local government sanitary initiatives in the early-nineteenth century.

[9] Davis, John, ‘Central government and the towns’ and Doyle, Barry M., ‘The changing functions of urban government: councillors, officials and pressure groups’, in ibid, Daunton, Martin J., (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 3: 1840-1950, pp. 261-286, 287-314.

[10] Finlayson, Geoffrey, ‘The Municipal Corporation Commission and Report, 1833-5’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, Vol. 36, (1963), pp. 36-52 and ‘The politics of municipal reform, 1835’, English Historical Review, Vol. 81, (1966), pp. 673-692.

[11] Owen, David, The government of Victorian London 1855-1889: the Metropolitan Board of Works, the vestries, and the City Corporation, (Harvard University Press), 1982.

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.

---

[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.

---

[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.

---

[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.

---

[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.