Victorian Cities

by Asa Briggs

In 1837, in England and Wales, there were only five provincial cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants. By 1891 there were twenty-three. Over the same period London’s population more than doubled. In this companion volume to Victorian People and Victorian Things, Lord Briggs focuses on the cities of Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Middlesbrough, Melbourne (an example of a Victorian community overseas) and London, comparing and contrasting their social, political and topographical development. Full of illuminating detail, Victorian Cities presents a unique social, political and economic bird's-eye view of the past.

Genres: History, Victorian, Cities, Nonfiction, British Literature, Urban, London

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Asa Briggs, Baron Briggs was an English historian, best known for his studies on the Victorian era. In particular, his trilogy, Victorian People, Victorian Cities, and Victorian Things made a lasting mark on how historians view the nineteenth century. He was made a life peer in 1976.

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

This isn't, and doesn't aspire to be, a comprehensive history of Victorian Cities. It is a series of postcards of six individual cities sandwiched between wider ranging introductory chapters and an epilogue.

The argument of the whole book is a display of Keatsian negative capability as Briggs advances the views that the cities presented can be both typical of general trends and are specifically individual and that no generalisation is possible. This may sound silly, but at the end of the book I think, though I might be fooling myself, that I can see what he means.

Each of the postcards has a bright picture of a central event: the debate over free trade in Manchester, the building of the Town Hall in Leeds, the development of the 'civic gospel' in Birmingham. Themes mentioned in the introduction such as the impact of the railways, patterns of urbanisation, migration or public health are given a local context. The city chapters are arranged in a rough chronological order beginning with Manchester in the 1830s and finishing with Melbourne (the only non-English city to be covered) and London in the 1880s.

The main weaknesses of this are that it doesn't even provide a comprehensive view of English cities during the period - although some attempt is made to remedy this by bringing Lincoln, Norwich and Exeter (among others) into the discussion in the Epilogue. There's very little comparison to other cities and the technical changes in transport, gas and water infrastructure which supported the growth of cities and distinguished them from earlier cities is only implied and not addressed.

This postcard approach works best with the chapter on Middlesbrough. but then the story is at its simplest with Middlesbrough, a city that didn't exist prior to the reign of Queen Victoria and which was dominated first by the coal trade, then iron, and finally steel production. The problem is with those cities which had more complex histories. The reader is offered a selection of tiny appetizers but with no hope of a main course. As essays each chapter provides a vivid picture of certain aspects of the city at a point in time but no more than that. But now as a poor reader I'm left wanting to read more on the rise of the Fabians and the ill-fated politics of the all too short lived London County Council.

The key point about Manchester is that it is a city of big factories with machines doing skilled work with a large low and unskilled workforce required to service those machines, this single factor drives all the others - mass immigration, poor quality housing, low life expectancy, extreme politics - free traders versus Chartists versus Agrarian-conservatives. The Free Trade Hall built hard by the site of the Peterloo massacre Briggs points out.

Briggs looks at the construction of a town-hall in Leeds, two factors here 'economists' in local government - people elected on a ticket of spending as little as possible and keeping the rates low and extreme localism manifesting in a desire for aggrandisement. Frequently Town Councils were dominated by shop keepers who had been elected as councillors and typically those men were frightened by the large sums of money required to finance sewage treatment works for instance as they related all costs to their own small business experience and so insisted on strict economies and a hesitant and reluctant role for the Town Council inn shaping civic life. The architect who designed the Town Hall was inspired by that of Ghent, claiming that an impressive town hall alone would bring visitors to the city, in this spirit he designed a tower for the building - this was rejected by the councillors on the grounds that it wouldn't do anything just look pretty, on the grounds of economy the councillors insisted that if construction costs exceeded the estimates the architect wouldn't get paid. The building contractor went bust, however the city did gets itself a town-hall (with tower). Prior to this council meeting often occur in the function rooms of pubs or similar small venues while council work also isn't concentrated into a suite of offices but conducted from all kinds of odd venues.

Birmingham sits in contrast to Manchester - small workshops employing skilled labour - relations between employers and employees were close and direct. Religion was the main political division with Anglicans voting conservative and non-Anglicans voting for liberal or radical politicians frequently mobilising around the cause of teetotalism. Irish Home rule causes a major split -all reminiscent of contemporary identity politics. The main theme though is the creation of a liberal caucus that brings Liberals to control the School boards post 1870 and then to seize the Town Council under Joseph Chamberlain and the Westminster parliamentary seats. Chamberlain has a vision of the potential power of local government and with some arm twisting buys up the local gas and water companies, and with massively increased revenues can fund improvements and building a sewage plant as people get sick eventually of the city dumping raw sewage into the rivers.

Middlesborough is perhaps the most interesting case from the point of view of globalisation - a town founded by Quakers to ship out their coal more profitably, others then exploit the iron ore in the Cleveland hills to start iron founderies - however with the move to steel, more investment is needed to build steel furnaces, but steel requires a different quality of ore so within less than a hundred years of the founding of the city it finds itself in a contemporary situation - competing in a global market on the basis of quality and cost with no inherent advantage in either. Politically similar to some of the other towns with the issue of teetotalism dividing voters, also a Buddenbrooks effect of the withdrawal of the families who owned the major businesses and originally had the town built from public life and then in turn from business life.

Melbourne, a curious choice, in a sense similar to Middlesborough as a brand new town, not really typical of most empire cities. Much of the discussion turns on issues of identity, the place of a town with many non-Australian immigrants in the context of emergent Australian identity which is focused on rural life and the Bush, yet naturally some common Victorian issues in sewage treatment and public transport, interesting in that relatively fancy suburbs were being developed at the same time as a good sized chunk of the population were still living in tents.

London, the main topic here the creation of the London County Council (LLC) and how that was weakened by the creation of new London boroughs within its territory, probably not coincidentally because Radical and Fabian candidates did unexpectedly well in the first elections. Briggs develops into a discussion on H.G. Wells and George Gissing. Wells' vision of an orderly world government indeed appears to be more like a union of LCCs dominated by Fabians than a super strong UN. The story too of the discovery of the deepest, darkest, mysterious East End of London at the time of Imperialism causing a crisis in thinking - that the people there, just as in the rest of the empire needed to be converted and corralled into being useful subjects. The Boar War links that to Chamberlain - Radicalism at home and Imperialism abroad but Briggs doesn't go down that road.

No maps, graphs, charts or illustrations. Some tables but no other furniture.

Reread and release!

[Gareth Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many historical works these days are designed very much for the general reader with careful explanation of the key underlying history. This book is written for a rather well-read general reader, who has a very good knowledge of 19th century British history. For such a reader, or for an ignorant red are who is prepared to allow some of the allusions to ride, this is an interesting book. I found the chapters on middlesbrough and Leeds especially interesting. However, my lack of detailed knowledge of the reform movement and various local government acts caused the book to be less enlightening in some parts.

[James Askari · Rating 4 out of 5]

With the wide-ranging introduction, especially, with forays in sociology, demography and urbanism, we get a sense of what we have lost--perhaps just with Briggs as a unique historian, but maybe a whole 60s-70s university culture, humanistic, funded, open to working-class intellectuals, egalitarian and socially democratic in spirit. In sympathy with the problems of the nineteenth century city, and with the leaders trying to solve them, Briggs defends Manchester, Birmingham, Melbourne and Chicago (all but Birmingham 'shock cities') from Mumford's charge of being 'man-heaps' haphazardly divided into 'slum, semi-slum and super-slum'. His history, different in the case of each cities, investigates the combined effect of Parliamentary statute (like the Nuisance Laws), individual and party-political effort and bottom-up social agitation in driving improvement (compulsory purchases, slum clearances, sewerage, municipal finance, metropolitan-owned profitable water and gas companies). Every quotation, from contemporary newspapers, Parliamentary debates (not just Blue Books), association and commission minutes, is a plum; and one wonders not just at the historian's powers of synthesis, but at his reading.

In the years from roughly 1835 to 1865, in the contest behind Birmingham and Manchester, Birmingham wins. Manchester's idea is freedom of trade, investment and ideas; of competition, more or less untrammeled, between peer manufacturers, whatever the state of the business cycle, tending to the betterment of employees. Birmingham, rather, through the Methodist and extraordinarily confident Joseph Chamberlain (who wore a seal skin jacket to social engagements), held to a 'civic gospel' by which a city owed its inhabitants the same sort of protections and entitlements a country did its citizens. Briggs also With the wide-ranging introduction, especially, with forays in sociology, demography and urbanism, we get a sense of what we have lost--perhaps just with Briggs as a unique historian, but maybe a whole 60s-70s university culture, humanistic, funded, open to working-class intellectuals, egalitarian and socially democratic in spirit. In sympathy with the problems of the nineteenth century city, and with the leaders trying to solve them, Briggs defends Manchester, Birmingham, Melbourne and Chicago (all but Birmingham 'shock cities') from Mumford's charge of being 'man-heaps' haphazardly divided into 'slum, semi-slum and super-slum'. His history, different in the case of each cities, investigates the combined effect of Parliamentary statute (like the Nuisance Laws), individual and party-political effort and bottom-up social agitation in driving improvement (compulsory purchases, slum clearances, sewerage, municipal finance, metropolitan-owned profitable water and gas companies). Every quotation, from contemporary newspapers, Parliamentary debates (not just Blue Books), association and commission minutes, is a plum; and one wonders not just at the historian's powers of synthesis, but at his reading.

In the years from roughly 1835 to 1865, in the contest behind Birmingham and Manchester, Birmingham wins. Manchester's idea is freedom of trade, investment and ideas; of competition, more or less untrammeled, between peer manufacturers, whatever the state of the business cycle, tending to the betterment of employees. Birmingham, rather, through the Methodist and extraordinarily confident Joseph Chamberlain (who wore a seal skin jacket to social engagements), held to a 'civic gospel' by which a city owed its inhabitants the same sort of protections and entitlements a country did its citizens. Briggs also has 'case study' chapters on Leeds (concerned with personalities, personal ambitions, institutions), Middlesborough (a narrative history of the Mecklenburger Henry Bolckow, naturalised so he could become an M.P., and his partner Henry Vaughan, who discovered ironstone on a walk in the Cleveland Hills) and Melbourne (a booming frontier city, challengingly unlike Britain, through the 1880s, when it was supported by speculative investment in residences and warehouses). In the end, these treatments are a bit miscellaneous, and it's the introduction that pulls the book together.

[Paul Wood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and captivating insight into the growth and governance of British (and Australian) cities.It has aged remarkably well considering it was written in the 1960s, but is somewhat obscure in places, particularly when referencing the work of other historians. Made me want to read HG Wells early novels...

[Johanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit dated and rather too much about civic politics and less about the cities' buildings and lives of their inhabitants. That said it is interesting to compare and contrast cities and how the local industries and the civic approach to governance impacted on their development.

[Frank Stein · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book Asa Briggs offers a thoughtful and careful look at Victorian cities, which were often denigrated for their chaos and filth but which, as he shows, were also the source of unprecedented local activism and concrete achievements. As he shows part of this activist impetus came from the rise of the "provincial" cities, especially Manchester (in the 1830s and '40s) and then Birmingham (in the 1860s and '70s). But Briggs also looks at the combined efforts in Leeds and Bradford (the first woolens the second worsteds), Middlesborough (coal to rail manufacturers), and even Melbourne in Australia (a gold rush boom town that plateaued after a crash in 1890).

Historically London dominated English urban life completely. In 1750 at 650,000 people it was more than ten times larger than Bristol (and historically it was somewhat proportionally larger than 2nd place Norwich). But by the by 1860s at almost 3 million it was "only" five times larger than Liverpool (although it was 7 to 10 times larger than Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds). While London was only slightly transformed by Benjamin Hall and his Metropolitan Board of Works act of 1855, the provincial cities were completely transformed by the Municipal Corporation Act of 1835, which gave them new powers and authorities. The cities were the home of "nonconformism" (above 50% in Bradford, and Leeds, and almost that in Birmingham and Manchester) and reform movements unparalleled in the capital. Everywhere in these cities there were great battles between the "Economists" and the "Improvers" with the former always worrying about high "rates" on property, but in general the latter won. The expenditure of local authorities went from almost 30 million pounds in 1870 to 76 million in 1890, when local debt reached 300 million (although, as Briggs points out, the rates barely changed in this period due to the increase in property values.)

Manchester of course was home to the "Manchester School" of Richard Cobden and John Bright, who championed free enterprise and free trade, but it was also home to JP Kay and Peter Gaskell, whose two medical studies of the working population in 1832 and '33 respectively formed the basis for later reforms. It was home of Mary Gaskell's protest novels, such as Mary Barton, of the 1840s that became the basis for many later efforts. Manchestertum, the German idea of Manchester's economic theory, actually came from the fact that the city was so international. The local notables were not against government in all cases: Cobden helped the incorporation of Manchester in 1838. Sir Joseph Heron became the famous Town Clerk in the city from its foundation until his death in 1889.

While Birmingham's "civic gospel" under Mayor Joseph Chamberlain is most famous, Briggs shows that cities such as Leeds and Middlesborough also spent an inordinate amount of time clearing new streets and creating general surveyors, creating municipal health inspectors, placing sophisticated drainage and sewerage systems, creating building and smoke regulations, constructing magnificent Town Halls, and buying municipal water and gas works (Birmingham was if anything late to this). It was only after 1888 and the formation of the London County Council, as well as the reemergence of London at the forefront of British growth, that the provincial cities, and their political efforts, declined in public consciousness.

There is much else to learn in this book about the distinctive contributions of English urban life in this era (from the cacophony of different "improvement commissions" and "boards of works" and "vestries" that governed before and after formal incorporations to the importance of permanent town clerks and civil services (Chamberlain, for instance, said corruption would enter Britain when the the highest servants were paid less and the lowest more than their market value)). Even more than fifty years on this book is a wonderful look at an important part of English, urban, and even world history.

[Geoffrey Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic text on the Victorian City. A breezy and entertaining read. There's no grand thesis but the chapter on the building of Leeds Town Hall is quite memorable and captures what one might call the "Mid-Victorian state of mind." Recommended.

[Clare Flynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This proved invaluable to me in researching Middlesbrough in Victorian times. I had no idea until I read this that Middlesbrough was a dramatically growing city then and described by Gladstone as "an infant Hercules"

[Jur]

Birmingham, Manchester, London, Melbourne, Leeds, Middlesborough in the 19th century. Development and civic pride