Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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centrate on the diplomatic and supervisory functions it performed well. The
shift (especially after ) to national government finance and administration
for universal provision of minimum standards of relief from poverty and of
medical care in hospitals and by general practitioners left local government to
concentrate on education, housing and other functions that appeared at the time
better suited to the structure of local authorities. Crucial to this shift, as Martin
Daunton argues, was the ability of the national government to increase revenue
through income tax. The changing balance was an uneven process, far from
inevitable, fraught with tensions and conflicts, marked by collaboration, changes
in the sectors and losses as well as gains. The poor law guardians, for example,
increasingly marginalised in the provision of urban social welfare, gave way in
to large local government committees and eventually the central govern-
ment at the cost of a loss of local, democratic accountability and opportunities
for local influence on the levels and conditions of relief payments.
146
Similarly,
the decline of friendly societies is linked to a loss of local influence over indi-
vidual health care, though their coverage was far from universal. The national
insurance legislation of created a partnership between the central govern-
ment and commercial insurance companies which was dissolved by the national
insurance legislation of with each going a separate way. Meanwhile, the
central government absorbed, under the appointed, nationally financed regional
hospital boards of the NHS, the voluntary and local authority hospitals which
ran in parallel and often in competition in the s.
147
Yet, even after at the height of central government provision of social ser-
vices for the relief of poverty and medical care, voluntarism and local authorities
were not a by-product but an integral part of the contemporary concept of the
welfare state.
148
Since then the balance has changed: rather than coming under
local government, the NHS and the provision of health care became further
removed from local government by the abolition of the medical officers of health
in , and from the s there has been growing emphasis on the provision
of social welfare by the voluntary and commercial sectors. Nevertheless, within
these overall changes in the balance of the welfare mix, variations in the source
and, to some extent, in the level of provision among individual urban areas
remain. Different locations within the urban hierarchy can make a difference.
Urban history still matters, even in the provision of those social welfare services,
earliest and least controversially transferred to central government.
Marguerite Dupree
146
Vincent, Poor Citizens, pp. –; Daunton, ‘Payment and participation’, ‒.
147
Finlayson, ‘Moving frontier’; C. Webster, ‘Labour and the origins of the National Health
Service’, in N. Rupke, ed., Science, Politics and the Public Good: Essays in Honour of Margaret Gowing
(London and Basingstoke, ), pp. –.
148
W. Beveridge, Voluntary Action: A Report on Methods of Social Advance (London, ); Finlayson,
Citizen, State and Social Welfare, pp. –.
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·
·
Structure, culture and society in British towns
. .
A
start of the period covered by this volume, two men wrote about
social relationships in British towns in very different ways. Thomas
Chalmers was a Scottish minister of religion.
1
He spent much energy
trying to reconcile political economy and evangelical religion. In , he wrote:
In a provincial capital, the great mass of the population are retained in kindly and
immediate dependence on the wealthy residents of the place. It is the resort of
annuitants, and landed proprietors, and members of the law, and other learned pro-
fessions, who give impulse to a great amount of domestic industry, by their expen-
diture; and, on inquiry into the sources of maintenance and employment for the
labouring classes there, it will be found they are chiefly engaged in the immediate
service of ministering to the wants and luxuries of the higher classes in the city.
This brings the two extreme orders of society into that sort of relationship which
is highly favourable to the general blandness and tranquillity of the whole popu-
lation. In a manufacturing town on the other hand, the poor and the wealthy stand
more disjointed from each other. It is true they often meet, but they meet more
on an arena of contest, than on a field where the patronage and custom of the one
party are met by the gratitude and good will of the other. When a rich customer
calls a workman into his presence, for the purpose of giving him some employ-
ment connected with his own personal accommodation, the general feeling of the
later must be altogether different from what it would be, were he called into the
presence of a trading capitalist, for the purpose of cheapening his work, and being
dismissed for another, should there not be an agreement in their terms.
2
His own experience was in Edinburgh and Glasgow but equally he saw a con-
trast between places like Oxford and Bath on the one hand and manufacturing
1
Rev. William Hanna, Memoirs of Thomas Chalmers, D.D. LL.D., vols. (Edinburgh, ); Stewart
J. Brown, Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland (Oxford, ); Stewart J.
Brown and Michael Fry, eds., Scotland in the Age of the Disruption (Edinburgh, ).
2
T. Chalmers, The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns, vol. (Edinburgh, –), pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
cities like Leeds and Manchester on the other. For Chalmers, towns with
different economic and social structures produced very different sorts of social
relationships. In other words, specific economic structures, market relationships
as well as relationships of production, provided the explanation or at least created
conditions for different cultural outcomes. Chalmers’ work was driven by
anxiety over religious observance, pauperism and disorder. He saw the town as
a place of problems created by these new conditions but problems for which
thinking and moral men could provide solutions.
Robert Vaughan was very different, a dissenting minister from the West of
England, an intellectual of the Congregational Union. In The Age of Great Cities,
published in , he defended cities as places of freedom and progress, part of
‘the struggle between the feudal and the civic’.
3
He had very clear ideas as to
why this should be so. He regarded the spread of knowledge as crucial for
freedom. Cities were part of this as they provided conditions for the creation of
an active press and publication by ‘large sales and small profits’.
4
Art and science
flourished in the cities because they were places of ‘ceaseless action . . . [and] . . .
accumulation’ which provided resources for ‘minds capable of excelling in
abstract studies’. He recognised that the ‘more constant and more varied associ-
ation into which men are brought by means of great cities tends necessarily to
impart greater knowledge, acuteness and power to the mind than . . . a rural
parish’.
5
The urban labour market was another source of freedom as ‘the poor
are little dependent on the rich, the employed are little dependent on their
employers’.
6
It was not just that Vaughan was more optimistic than Chalmers
about urban life, but his whole structure of argument differed. Vaughan looked
to something which a later generation of sociologists would call an ‘urban way
of life’ and derived from this a whole set of social relationships.
7
Urban in the
generic sense created the conditions for freedom, choice, wealth and progress.
Although he recognised class conflict and the inequalities of wealth, Vaughan’s
ideal was a society of rational, knowledgeable individuals not a society of hier-
archies. The inequalities of feudalism and class would be reduced by the working
of the intelligence and association of the city. The urban created relationships
now identified with modernity.
8
These two attempts to explain and understand what was happening in British
towns contained elements of a wider and continuing debate on the nature and
relationship of social structure and culture in British towns. Although definitions
R. J. Morris
3
Robert Vaughan, TheAge of Great Cities (London, ), p. .
4
Ibid.,p..
5
Ibid.,p..
6
Ibid., p. .
7
Louis Wirth, ‘Urbanism as a way of life’, in Louis Wirth, On Cities and Social Life, ed. Albert J.
Reiss, jr. (Chicago, ).
8
M. Savage and A. Warde, Urban Sociology, Capitalism and Modernity (Basingstoke, ); Gunther
Barth, City People:The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford, );
M. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
are contested they must be attempted. Social structures are perceived regularities
of social behaviour and characteristics identified by relevant social actors or by
the observer analyst. These structures are orderly, patterned and persistent.
Those selected for comment and analysis are those judged to be important in the
explanation of action, experience and change.
9
In the European literature of the
last two hundred years, structures involved in the material relationships of pro-
duction have been given especial attention but attention has rapidly extended to
relationships of reproduction and association such as gender, family and the
urban. The identification of social structures is important because of their place
in explanation.
10
Few studies consider that historical actions and change were
determined by key structures but many do see structure as one of several
influences. Indeed, the influence of structure in these accounts may go beyond
the meanings attributed to them and work in ways not perceived by historical
actors.
11
One theoretical extreme questions the knowability of social structure.
After all, the evidence from which such structures were deduced were them-
selves cultural products, but the task of inferring structures remains a matter of
self-conscious historical and analytical judgement. Perhaps most common is the
view that structure, especially those related to material production, set broad
limits within which human agency could act and react.
12
In explanations of the nature of experience in British towns, human agency
operated not just to produce specific actions but in the creation of culture. That
culture may be defined as the series of meanings which human beings attrib-
uted to actions, objects, to other people over the whole range of practice from
religion to politics, production and consumption.
13
Cultural resources guide
action by providing boundaries, legitimacy and motivations as well as by
opening up possibilities. Causal relationships are contested. A simplistic and
rarely presented view might consider culture as a product of structure, especially
economic structure. More common is the view that culture is influenced by
structure. Thus the wage labour of large factories makes class-conscious politics
possible but was in no way asufficient ‘cause’. The perspective which regards
culture as an autonomous element in any historical situation is especially impor-
tant for urban historians as urban cultures not only build upon the resources
inherited from their own past but also import and select cultural elements from
Structure, culture and society in British towns
19
Joseph Melling and Jonathan Barry, eds., Culture in History: Production, Consumption and Values in
Historical Perspective (Exeter, ); Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction
of Reality (London, ); John Rex, Key Problems in Sociological Theory (London, ).
10
Melling and Barry, Culture in History, especially introduction and essays by Stephen Mennell and
Iain Hampsher Monk, pp. –.
11
A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge, ), pp. –, –.
12
Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London, ), pp. –
13
Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion as a cultural system’, in Michael Banton, ed., Anthropological Approaches
to the Study of Religion (London, ), pp. –; M. Douglas and B. Isherwood, The World of Goods
(London, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
national and international culture. Mendelssohn’s Elijah came to the Birming-
ham Music Festival in because the middle-class elite of that city wanted
to take part in the broad stream of European culture not because of the small
workshop nature of production or even the rapidly changing nature of the
market in that city.
14
Within the debate remains an interest in long-term social processes. Did the
spread and intensification of capitalist relationships create certain types of
conflict and social identity? Is there a long-term process of ‘civilisation’ in which
perhaps towns and cities are implicated? Do the social and cultural processes of
modernity exist in which the accumulation of wealth and knowledge leads to a
rational individualistic society? How far do traditions of law, market relationships
and certain types of institutional practice produce a ‘civil society’?
15
This debate over structure and culture matters for several reasons. Culture
includes the many processes that give meanings. These meanings have agency.
They promote individual actions. They are the basis on which identities are
created and mobilised. The attention given to structure derives from the feeling
that it matters if a town depends on wage labour working in large units of pro-
duction, rather than casual labour on uncertain and low wages. This attention
derived from the belief that social relationships were influenced by the fact that
a town derived its income from the pensions and rentier incomes of retired males
or unmarried females rather than from an elite of merchants and manufacturers
employing wage labour. These structures were related to different social
situations.
Under the conditions of industrial capitalism selling to ‘distant markets’ the
city, the town, the urban place was the site where the processes that link culture
and structure were interacting in the clearest and strongest ways. In a true sense
the city was the frontier of capitalism and modernity. Capitalism, that is a system
of social and economic relationships defined by private ownership, the search
for profits and a cash economy, was linked to modernity, a system defined by
the accumulation of knowledge, rationality and the division of public and
private in human actions and feelings. The city itself was one product of this
interaction. The city was both a structure and a cultural product.
16
Once created
in both its material and cultural sense, the city became an object of contest
within the middle class, between classes and between self-aware interest groups
R. J. Morris
14
R. J. Morris, ‘Middle-class culture, –’, in D. Fraser, ed., A History of Modern Leeds
(Manchester, ).
15
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford, ), originally published ; J. A. Hall, ed.,
Civil Society (Cambridge, ); Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work (Princeton, );
Savage and Warde, Urban Sociology.
16
R. J. Morris, ‘The middle class and British towns and cities of the Industrial Revolution,
–’, in D. Fraser and A. Sutcliffe, eds., The Pursuit of Urban History (London, ), pp.
–.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
around which other identities and realised structures were formed. In the minds
of those involved the town itself became an ‘actor’. It was reified and people
reacted to the relationships of the towns and the perceived realities of social
structure.
17
The interest in the relationship between urban culture and the economic and
social structure of British towns was and is part of a wider inquiry into the nature
of the British response to industrial change. It was part of a desire to understand
the long-term stability of British society coupled with the persistence of class-
based conflicts of industrial and urban change.
18
Before going further, a warning.
This section is not just about what happened in British towns and cities, it is
about a debate, an argument, a search for understandings. Because of this the
section must be read at two levels. It is about the social processes and experiences
of these towns and cities. It is about what actually happened. It is also an account
of the way in which historians and contemporaries have tried to understand
what was happening. Before the mid-s, historians gave central place to the
politics, and to the relationships, consciousness and culture of social class. From
the late s, this emphasis was being supplemented by the identities and struc-
tures of gender and those of nationalism, religion and ethnicity. At the same time
there was a growing awareness of the independent generation of culture and its
powerful agency in the direction of human conduct. This was accompanied by
a less intense debate which questioned the clarity and validity of the urban–rural
dichotomy, the integrity of the urban place and even any concept of the urban
itself. History as always is not just an account of the past, it is an account of the
relationship between past and present .
The reluctance of historians to debate the nature of the city or of the urban
as a social structure or as an aspect of culture poses considerable problems for an
inquiry into the relationship between culture and structure in the towns and
cities of Britain. The definition of the urban as a form of human association and
settlement with the properties of size, density and variety is incomplete but
density, especially transactional density, and variety though not ‘causes’ of an
‘urban way of life’ are crucial parameters in urban experience and identities. The
urban place was also a focus for power, a ‘fort’, a ‘market’ and a ‘temple’.
19
In
the nineteenth-century town, the market and its institutions were increasingly
diffuse and pervasive. The castle and the city walls had been replaced by the town
Structure, culture and society in British towns
17
This is in part a response to the warning and challenge of Philip Abrams, ‘Towns and economic
growth: some theories and problems’, in P. Abrams and E. A. Wrigley, eds., Towns in Societies
(Cambridge, ), and R. E. Pahl, Whose City? (London, ), pp. –.
18
R. J. Morris, Class and Class Consciousness in the Industrial Revolution, – (London, );
M. Savage and A. Miles, The Remaking of the British Working Class, – (London, ).
19
Wirth, ‘Urbanism as a way of life’; Max Weber, The City, trans. and ed. Don Martindale and
Gertrud Neuwirth (New York, ); Paul Wheatley, ‘What the greatness of a city is said to be’,
Pacific Viewpoint, (), –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
hall and the local government rate demand. The ‘temple’ no longer had the
mystic of the priest king, but municipal ceremonies, foundation myths and sport
were some of the ways in which the urban places of industrial Britain inspired
loyalty and gave meaning to citizens’ lives.
The Lancashire mill towns were not representative British towns but to his-
torians and contemporaries they represented the leading edge of the fundamen-
tal impact of industrial change.
20
The cotton-spinning town of Oldham in
Lancashire has become a ‘type site’. In mid-century, the social relationships of
Oldham were dominated by a wage relationship in which , wage-earning
families sold their labour to seventy families which gained income from the own-
ership of capital in the cotton-spinning, coal-mining and hatting industries.
21
The outcome was an aggressive radical culture which gained control of key
agencies of local government, the vestry, police and poor law and guided a series
of main force confrontations, notably in the general strikes of and .
This culture was informed by an experience of economic change in which
wages had fallen, income was disrupted by massive fluctuations in demand and
technological change seemed to bring increased inequality and loss of control
for working people. The political debates of this period blamed the ‘oppressive
conduct of capitalists’ and their ‘misapplication of machinery’ and identified
change in the overall system of economic and political arrangements as a solu-
tion.
22
In the s, Manchester, influenced by the large units of production of
the cotton industry, had been unable to sustain a coherent campaign in favour
of parliamentary reform whilst Birmingham, dominated by small workshop pro-
duction, generated the Birmingham Political Union which became a model for
working-class and middle-class cooperation.
23
A generation later the casual
labour market of east London produced a political culture with little formal
organisation but outbreaks of violence which spread to Trafalgar Square and the
West End in and . This brought a broadly based philanthropic response
from the middle classes of the capital.
24
Bath fitted the consumer society which
Chalmers identified as the basis of kindly relationships. In fact the outcome in
the s was an active radical political culture with clear demands for political
change widening the franchise and introducing the secret ballot. Other areas
dominated by skilled labour, notably Edinburgh and parts of south London, were
the base for an assertive radical culture of the skilled male labour force but a
R. J. Morris
20
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. and ed. W. O. Henderson
and W. H. Chaloner (Oxford, ); Sir George Head, Home Tour through the Manufacturing Districts
of England in the Summer of (London, ).
21
J. Foster, ‘Nineteenth-century towns – a class dimension’, in H. J. Dyos, ed., The Study of Urban
History (London, ), pp. –.
22
J. Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (London, ), pp. –.
23
A. Briggs, Victorian Cities (London, ), pp. –; Asa Briggs, ‘The background of the parlia-
mentary reform movement in three English cities (–)’, Cambridge Historical Journal,
(–), –.
24
G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford, ), pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
culture which was prepared to bargain with the agencies of middle-class and elite
power.
25
Further inquiry added increasing layers of complexity to the initial account.
The nature of local leadership was crucial. The Birmingham banker, Thomas
Attwood, was influential in the creation of the consensus which was the basis of
the Birmingham Political Union and in sustaining this consensus through several
conflict-ridden years. Equally, elements of recent history and historical memory
were important. In Manchester memories of Peterloo were a major barrier to
cooperation. In , a radical demonstration had been violently broken up by
volunteer yeomanry closely identified with the local middle classes. A compari-
son of Oldham with other Lancashire mill towns reduced the importance of the
large technologically advanced factory as a basis for explanation. In , the
number of workers per firm in the cotton textile industry of Oldham was , well
below Blackburn (), Manchester () and Ashton ().
26
In Birmingham
any consensus relationship derived from the experience of small workshops
rapidly deteriorated in the s and s under the impact of competition from
a very few large units and the control of the market by merchants.
27
Manchester
was as much a place of warehouses, banks and shops as it was of factories. Factories
were only one aspect of the economic power of a middle-class elite of substan-
tial employers, merchants and professionals. They were linked to the urban by the
local land and labour markets, by an increasingly complex infrastructure and by
an increasingly focused urban government.
28
At the start of this period, the
middle classes of Leeds and Glasgow included substantial numbers of commer-
cial and professional people. West Bromwich, Bilston and Wolverhampton were
similar. All included large numbers of tradesmen and shopkeepers.
29
In Oldham, the middling classes of shopkeepers and small masters, often sub-
jected to threats of exclusive dealing in elections, featured in the analysis as
Structure, culture and society in British towns
25
R. S. Neale, Class and Ideology in the Nineteenth Century (London, ), pp. –; R. S. Neale,
Bath, –. A Social History. Or, A Valley of Pleasure,Yet a Sink of Iniquity (London, ); G.
Crossick, An Artisan Elite in Victorian Society (London, ); R. Q. Gray, The Labour Aristocracy in
Victorian Edinburgh (Oxford, ).
26
D. S. Gadian, ‘Class consciousness in Oldham and other North-West industrial towns,
–’, HJ, (), –.
27
C. Behagg, Politics and Production in the Early Nineteenth Century (London, ).
28
V. A. C. Gatrell, ‘Incorporation and the pursuit of Liberal hegemony in Manchester, –’,
in D. Fraser, ed., Municipal Reform and the Industrial City (Leicester, ); Simon Gunn, ‘The
Manchester middle class, –’ (PhD thesis, University of Manchester, ).
29
R. J. Morris, Class, Sect and Party (Manchester, ); Stana Nenadic, ‘The structure, values and
influence of the Scottish urban middle class: Glasgow, –’ (PhD thesis, University of
Glasgow, ); S. Nenadic, ‘The Victorian middle classes’, in W. H. Fraser and I. Maver, eds.,
Glasgow, vol. : – (Manchester, ), pp. –; R. H. Trainor, ‘Authority and social
structure in an industrial area: a study of three Black Country towns, –’ (DPhil thesis,
University of Oxford, ); R. H. Trainor, Black Country Elites (Oxford, ). These measures
were based upon the analysis of trades directories and parliamentary poll books.
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objects of contests between working-class and middle-class elite organisation. In
fact, these middling groups were the creative leadership of local radicalism in
places as varied as Oldham, Bath and Gateshead.
30
There was no simple relation-
ship of economic structure and outcome in terms of conflict and class. Ashton
and Blackburn were both dominated by large firms but Blackburn was a peace-
ful place with a working class apathetic to class action, whilst in Ashton militant
Chartists faced a pro-New Poor Law Board of Guardians. Oldham was a place
of class cooperation radicals whilst nearby Rochdale experienced a more liberal
basis for such cooperation. The nature and response of middle-class leadership
was an important element in explaining differences. In Stockport, effective
repression, especially in the use of blacklists of strikers, was used. Finally, both
radicals and middle-class leaders were influenced by recent local history and
memory. Oldham had a radical tradition drawn from the s whilst the suc-
cessful patronage and manipulation of local culture by Blackburn mill owners
through schools, libraries, reading rooms and Mechanics Institutions was based
upon a coherent response to late eighteenth-century experience of rioting and
mill burning.
31
The relationship between the economic and social structures of
an urban place and political and cultural outcomes was complex.
This account of structures derived from production must be supplemented by
those of reproduction, notably gender, as well as those ‘imagined’ but very real
and powerful identities of ethnicity and sectarianism.
32
R. J. Morris
30
Neale, Class and Ideology, pp. –; T. J. Nossiter, Influence, Opinion and Political Idioms in Reformed
England (Brighton, ).
31
D. S. Gadian, ‘Class formation and class action in North-West industrial towns, –’, in
R. J. Morris, ed., Class, Power and Social Structure in British Nineteenth-Century Towns (Leicester,
), pp. –.
32
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London, ); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (London, ).
60
50
40
30
20
10
Merchants Manufacturers Professional Shopkeepers Tradesmen
0
Glasgow 1832
Leeds 1834
Manchester 1832
West Bromwich 1834
Bilston 1834
Figure . ‘Middle-class’ occupational structure of five British towns –
Sources: as in n. .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
The early nineteenth century saw a substantial renegotiation of the subordi-
nations of gender around a culture of domesticity. This culture was initially an
expression of the ambitions of the middle classes to assert difference but by mid-
century was a formidable influence on all social classes.
33
The making and impact
of this culture was closely related to the situations, structures and networks of
urbanism. It was fuelled by a variety of cultural products which relied upon the
interactions and markets of the town. Print culture was vital, through news-
papers, periodicals, household and etiquette manuals as well as novels. The
lecture and the sermon from the threatening warmth of the evangelical to the
cold rationality of the unitarian served urban audiences.
34
It was not just as
Vaughan had predicted that the massing of people in the urban place created a
viable market and a critical mass for the exchange of ideas but that the modern
capitalist city was an environment in which the individual became both specta-
tor and actor. The meetings of the voluntary societies, charities, missionary soci-
eties, literary associations first excluded women and then reincorporated them
in subordinate, often passive roles. By the late nineteenth century a deep sense
of physical and moral insecurity derived from the anonymity of the city
expressed itself in a highly gendered form. The brutal Jack the Ripper murders
of several women in the ‘East End’ of London in were horrific enough but
their impact lay in the manner in which they were magnified by all aspects of
urban media from a newspaper press feeding on mass literacy to the ballad sheet
and popular theatre.
35
The most important location for the urban learning of
domesticity and gender were the shopping streets, especially that high point of
development the department store. It was not just a matter of following fashion
or exchanging gossip in the tea shops and restaurants. Shops and department
stores were places were women and men learnt the new domestic technologies,
Kendrick’s coffee grinder, Ransome’s lawn mower, or the new enclosed stoves.
At one level shopping was an aspect of the market economy, but by the end of
the century it was an intensely gendered ceremony which dominated key parts
of the central business district. In Edinburgh, the elaborate architectural deco-
ration of Messrs Jenner’s new department store on Princes’ Street included a
number of female statues ‘giving symbolic expression to the fact that women
have made the business concern a success’.
36
The most important spatial expression of the culture of domesticity was the
middle-class residential suburb. A number of prosperous urban dwellers had
always lived in a scattering of villas around the edges of the great towns. These
had grown in number in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In
Structure, culture and society in British towns
33
L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes (London, ).
34
J. Seed, ‘Theologies of power: unitarianism and the social relations of religious discourse,
–’, in Morris, ed., Class, Power and Social Structure, pp. –
35
J. R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight (London and Chicago, ).
36
John Reid, The New Illustrated Guide to Edinburgh (Edinburgh, c. ), p. .
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