Beyond the metropolis: The changing image of urban Britain, 1780–1880

By Katy Layton-Jones

Draws on previously unexplored visual and ephemeral sources to re-evaluate the British city, its changing form, representation and impact.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Feb 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784996611

Katy Layton-Jones

Katy Layton-Jones is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester and an Associate Lecturer at the Open University

Book preview

Introduction

In 1839, the author of the guidebook Manchester As It Is observed that ‘wherever a country becomes populous, nature is always compelled to give way to the convenience or the caprice of man … the whole forms a scene rich and magnificent, rarely equalled, perhaps nowhere excelled’.¹ Over the past two centuries this ‘scene’ of provincial urban Britain has proved a compelling subject for social commentators, politicians, and artists alike. From the time when urbanisation was first recognised as a radical and permanent phenomenon, debates and questions surrounding the physical, political, and social consequences of urban and industrial development accompanied every topographical modification; urbanisation, urban migration, and the industrialisation of the landscape became the object of popular scrutiny. Throughout the nineteenth century, commentators continued to compile both historic and prophetic accounts of rapidly evolving conurbations in an attempt to comprehend their future and that of the British nation and empire. Some, like Benjamin Love, celebrated its visual magnificence, while others including Charles Dickens and Benjamin Disraeli, presented a darker vision of manufacturing towns.² In 1839, the same year that Benjamin Love published his guide to Manchester, Thomas Carlyle was formulating his own response to provincial urbanisation and urban manufacturing. The resultant tract consolidated a number of disparate anxieties regarding urbanisation into a broadly anti-urban, anti-industrial polemic under the heading the ‘Condition of England Question’.³ Carlyle’s criticisms related mainly to the human impact of industrialisation, rather than the physical transformation of the landscape. Even so, the analogies he made between physical and moral disease sat well with pre-existing notions of Britain’s largest city, London, as a ‘great wen’ upon the body of the nation.⁴ In Chartism Carlyle argued for the moral re-examination of society, reasoning that ‘Boils on the surface are curable or incurable, – small matter which, while the virulent humour festers deep within; poisoning the sources of life.’⁵ This characterisation of modern society as diseased was swiftly taken up by other critics and applied to the urban provinces as well as London.

In 1842 the Mancunian Joseph Adshead argued that the state of the labouring classes in the Ancoats and Newton area of his home town was proof that ‘mere local or temporary remedies are by no means commensurate with the disease. The derangement is organic, and the remedial agency must likewise be organic’.⁶ Three years later, in his seminal treatise on the English industrial town, The Condition of the Working-Class in England (1845), Frederick Engels censured the urban environment, as much as the implicit economic inequities it harboured, for the poor standard of living experienced by the working population; he presented the town not merely as a symptom, but as a chief cause of the ‘malady’ of social degeneration. This perceived correspondence between implicit social tensions and the explicit physical form of towns led to these and other authors invoking rich, highly visual descriptions of the urban realm. These are epitomised in Engels’s portrait of the Lancashire factory towns as ‘irregularly built with foul courts, lanes, and back alleys, reeking of coal smoke, and especially dingy from the originally red brick turned black with time’.⁷ For Engels, the physicality and appearance of the urban environment provided a means of visualising the Condition of England question. Dirt, smoke, and dark bodies of water helped to characterise deeper problems that manifested themselves visually in the urban fabric. Still, his condemnation of the physical environment did not equate to an acquittal of human responsibility for the condition of the working classes. On the contrary, he considered the squalor that afflicted manufacturing towns to be the result of conscious neglect on the part of the influential middle classes as he demonstrated in relation to his favourite model, Manchester:

I have never seen so systematic a shutting out of the working-class from the thoroughfares, so tender a concealment of everything which might affront the eye and the nerves of the bourgeoisie, as in Manchester.⁸

Of the weaving town of Bradford, Engels observed: ‘on a fine Sunday it offers a superb picture, when viewed from the surrounding heights. Yet, within reigns the same filth and discomfort as in Leeds’.⁹ As these brief descriptions illustrate, while the urban environment could exacerbate social degeneration, the exterior appearance of a town could also serve to conceal its internal condition. Clearly, the visual appearance of towns, both internally and as viewed from afar, presented complex and often conflicting accounts of urbanisation. Understanding the nature of this debate and analysing the motives of those who represented the two main oppositional standpoints of ‘celebration’ and ‘despair’ has claimed the attention of historians and dictated the shape of historical argument surrounding urbanisation.¹⁰ When addressing this period of rapid urban change, historians and historical geographers alike have tended to interpret literary and visual accounts of urbanisation as expressing either euphoric endorsement or unadulterated condemnation.¹¹ This dichotomy of celebration and condemnation was applied explicitly by Asa Briggs in his definitive study of the Victorian city, wherein he argued that, to some observers urbanisation was ‘a matter of pride – cities were symbols of growth and progress’ and that to others ‘the spread of the cities and the increase in their numbers were matters of concern, even of alarm’.¹² It is certainly possible to locate evidence of that ‘alarm’ in the most familiar contemporary representation of the nineteenth-century town, the social-problem novel.¹³

This literary genre, epitomised by Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), found popularity among a mid-nineteenth-century reading public by emphasising and often sensationalising the urban environment. Comprising a relatively new literary format, formulated to represent new urban tableaux, these novels and their subject matter belonged peculiarly to the 1840s and 1850s and Joseph W. Childers has accordingly compared the production of novels to that of industrially manufactured consumables produced during the early Victorian period.¹⁴ Twentieth-century popular interpretations of the period were heavily informed by these literary melodramas, and more recently, their dramatisation on the large and small screen.¹⁵ However, too much emphasis continues to be placed upon the ‘historical’ nature of fictional narratives. Scholars have rejected H. J. Dyos’s advice that when ‘evaluating what the Victorian novel has to say about the city we have to keep reminding ourselves of its underlying predisposition to treat its subject as a hostile environment’ because such literature reflects ‘an aspect of the tendency of the high culture of Victorian Britain to express a pre-urban system of values’.¹⁶ So too have many failed to recognise that a similarly sceptical attitude should be adopted when analysing visual imagery. Resistance to such an approach has resulted in the emergence of a highly sensationalised and inaccurate image of the nineteenth-century city. The demonic city described so vividly in Lynda Nead’s Victorian Babylon has become a popular, almost inescapable idiom among urban, social, and cultural historians.¹⁷ Yet, although the visual and environmental impact of urbanisation and industry would be widely condemned in later years, during the first half of the nineteenth century (and often later) it was still possible to perceive urban and industrial expansion as complementary to aesthetic beautification and civic prestige. In order to identify and understand the values that informed contemporary interpretations of early nineteenth-century urbanisation, it is necessary to consider these representations from the perspective of continuity with the past, rather than searching for precursors of the Victorian Babylon model. Some historians have critiqued and challenged the strict periodisation of urban history, with contributors to the second volume of the Cambridge Urban History of Britain as well as art historian Elizabeth McKellar adopting the ‘the railway age’ as a more significant moment of qualitative change than 1800 or the conclusion of the Georgian era in 1830.¹⁸ Yet, despite their efforts, the binarism of ‘Georgian’ and ‘Victorian’ continues to dominate urban history and the related disciplines of art history and literature.

Literary descriptions made a powerful and lasting contribution to the identities and popular perceptions of towns such as Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow. However, they are matched in number by a mass of visual images, each of which charted the evolving urban scene in a distinct and often innovative way. Throughout the period covered by this book, the provincial urban environment was a recurring feature of prints and pictorial souvenirs as well as gazetteers, urban histories, and tour guides that contained an increasing quantity of visual material. The resulting array of literature and imagery presents the historian with a chaotic and often contradictory picture of nineteenth-century attitudes towards urbanisation. Nevertheless, it is a telling picture that reveals much about the expectations and values of those who viewed and represented the urban scene. Visual representations often challenge a number of previously well-established historical assumptions, both about the period in question, and the means with which historians can best approach its study. Ergo, this book has three central objectives. The first is to redress the dominance of the late nineteenth century in narratives of urban development, and to reposition the early decades of that century as a distinct and important period in the definition and visualisation of urban Britain. This includes demonstrating a degree of continuity with the prosperous Georgian town model that characterises many accounts of eighteenth-century urbanisation, while also tracing the steady and significant changes that distinguish early nineteenth-century provincial towns from those that preceded them.¹⁹ To this end, the chapters that follow demonstrate that the fears and anxieties expressed in the Dickensian novel were not the only influence upon a generation of observers who had not yet witnessed mass cooperation, municipalisation, the impact of railways, and the long-term political consequences of the 1832 Reform Act. They highlight the centrality of excitement, incredulity, anticipation, and reverence in nineteenth-century polemics about the urban environment. As Charles Dibdin’s 1801 description of Manchester exemplifies: ‘I am compelled, therefore, to pass over the buildings, which are magnificent; the manufactures, which are immense and almost incredible, and extend their influence to the surrounding villages in all directions … for the very word MANCHESTER implies industry and ingenuity’.²⁰ In addition to conveying the sheer scale of transformation that was taking place in the towns he visited, Dibdin’s observations also demonstrate that the aesthetic quality of a town was not necessarily enough to guarantee an enthusiastic response, as he stated that ‘STAFFORD is a clean, handsome and dull town. It resembles in those particulars DONCASTER’.²¹ In failing to reflect the subtlety and ambivalence of such descriptions, the continuing over-emphasis placed upon negative accounts of urbanisation has perpetuated a failure among scholars to acknowledge the enduring legacy of the eighteenth-century town, its form and social structure. The long-term impact of the social and political changes instigated within British towns during the Victorian period has served to obscure accounts dating from the preceding decades. There is now an urgent need to challenge the supremacy of the late nineteenth century in the narrative of provincial urbanisation.

The second objective is to challenge the all too pervasive dependence of historians upon a polarity of celebration and despair when characterising nineteenth-century attitudes to provincial towns.²² A range of negative opinions regarding towns and cities were certainly expressed during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and comprised a substantial section of popular opinion. However, they should be understood as only one facet of public feeling. As Asa Briggs realised in the 1960s, ‘the debate about the Victorian city … was a debate with different voices making themselves heard inside the city itself, and with the struggle between the defenders of the city, those who in various ways were proud of it, and its critics, particularly those who were afraid of it, ranging widely and probing deep’.²³ As we will see, the views of private individuals also changed according to the urban feature under discussion. Yet, the premise that the nineteenth-century city was, and was seen to be, a place where social and physical flux resulted invariably in extreme experiences and extreme perceptions has remained, for the most part, uncontested. Furthermore, while the dichotomy of celebration and despair remains a common analytical model, in recent years the anxious voice of despair has come to dominate historical commentary. Urbanisation, particularly when fuelled by industry, has been represented as a moral contrast to the innocence of rural living, or as Raymond Williams frames it, ‘worldliness’ as opposed to nature.²⁴ The social doctrines that informed the opinions of Carlyle and his sympathisers in the 1830s have come to be understood by some as the model of popular opinion towards urbanisation throughout the nineteenth century. Tristram Hunt’s account of the Victorian city has reiterated this familiar interpretation of the early nineteenth-century town as a demonic environment, the ‘New Hades’ of an industrial nation. In Building Jerusalem (2004), Hunt casts the early nineteenth century as a period of crisis for the British provincial town. Locations such as Manchester and Birmingham are presented as chaotic, a malady resolved only later in the century by urban investment and redevelopment initiated by the inhabitants of new ‘municipal palaces’.²⁵ Despite acknowledging the accomplishments of the late Victorian generation, Hunt’s perspective replicates the well-rehearsed position of much recent scholarship, including Boyd Hilton’s A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People. In a section titled ‘social crisis’, Hilton argues that quality of life often deteriorated for those who moved from rural areas into the newly expanding towns.²⁶ It would, of course, be wrong to question the existence of deprived and unsanitary areas in any large conurbation. Indeed a number of regions such as Manchester’s ‘Little Ireland’ were already identifiable as ‘slum’ areas by the late 1830s. There were a number of high-profile condemnations of the urban realm and particularly its ‘slums’, perhaps most famously Frederick Engels’s damning verdict on Manchester in 1844.²⁷ Still, the unequivocal focus upon these unfavourable accounts justifies a questioning of the dominant position they hold in historical understandings of nineteenth-century perceptions of towns and cities. While it is clear that the urban environment was increasingly a place in which crises occurred, observers did not necessarily consider the towns and cities themselves to be wholly damaging or toxic. Ambivalence rather than vehement condemnation or celebration characterises many contemporary accounts of provincial towns.

Responses to urbanisation resulted from wide-ranging motives and articulate equally diverse opinions. Their formation was dependent upon the age, occupation, and social rank of the author or artist, and their intended audience. Even more importantly, although often ignored, both literary and visual representations were informed by the peculiarities of different towns, their specific problems and triumphs. There was no single and definitive nineteenth-century attitude to urban expansion. As the following chapters demonstrate, early nineteenth-century responses to these sites were organised around a much more diverse range of polarities, which included a town’s historical status or modernity; the contrary or complementary roles of commerce and culture; the extent to which towns were perceived to integrate disparate communities and environments or fragment pre-existing populations and townscapes; and the ongoing process of exchange and symbiosis between a central district and its hinterland.

The third objective here, and arguably the one with the widest implications for the discipline, is to award visual evidence a more prominent position. If visual material is to be truly useful to the urban historian, it must be recognised and employed critically as a central tool in identifying the themes of historical enquiry, rather than merely illustrating existing historiography. While it is not the object of this research to contest reasonable reservations about the limitations of visual material, the following chapters will interrogate the range of fluctuating and sometimes contradictory values on display within images of specific sites as well as urban imagery in general.

The role of the visual

One of the most fundamental causes of twentieth-century condemnation of the nineteenth-century city is the sheer scale of urban expansion that took place. Rapid immigration to the cities was certainly one of the main reasons for the emergence of new slum areas, but such problem sites did not blight entire towns. Nevertheless, as H. J. Dyos observed, statistics on the growth of conurbations during this period have come to dominate our perceptions of the city.²⁸ There exists a vast literature of investigations into the experience of the urban environment from the perspectives of public health, social structure, urban planning, and political enfranchisement, but few address the way in which such issues affected the visualisation of provincial towns in printed and ephemeral imagery.²⁹ This type of analysis demands the employment of an additional, alternative range of sources, what J. H. Johnson and C. G. Pooley identify in their overview of historiography of the nineteenth-century city as: ‘sporadic … subjective but descriptive material’.³⁰ As perhaps the strongest indication of the changing status of provincial manufacturing and commercial towns was their increasing presence in printed imagery and illustrated publications, it is this category of sources which is addressed in most detail in this book.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the reorganisation of the nation’s political, economic, and social structure became increasingly understood as being synonymous with topographical transformation, in particular, the evolution of the urban townscape. As Penelope Corfield has said, the physical form of towns was ‘studied as visible proxy for other changes’.³¹ Consequently, provincial urbanisation was experienced by the majority of onlookers as a primarily visual phenomenon. In his introductory chapter to The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, D. W. Meinig observes that ‘landscape is defined by our vision’ and so, similarly, was the early nineteenth-century townscape.³² Meinig’s assertion is supported by Tristram Hunt who also notes that ‘the physical grime and soot, if not the philosophical pollution, of Coketown still configures our imagination of the Victorian city’.³³ Thus, it was the visual impact of structures like chimneys, warehouses, manufactories, and athenaeums that most widely and consistently informed common perceptions of provincial urban Britain. This enthusiasm for visual description did not necessarily result in dark and negative imagery. As William Hutton demonstrated in his description of Birmingham in 1783, the visual drama of the urban environment could be positively received and endorsed: ‘When the word Birmingham occurs, a superb picture instantly expands in the mind’.³⁴ Whether in colourful literary prose or a relatively opaque parliamentary report, early nineteenth-century accounts of the urban environment demonstrate a universal dependence upon visual description. The physical, and therefore visual characteristics of a townscape, its streets, structures, and atmospheric conditions, were employed repeatedly as the most immediate and universal means of representing a particular town, its failings, and its triumphs. Over the course of a few decades the role of visual material evolved to the point that it not only reflected urban qualities, but also came to define public expectations towards the urban environment. Each type of image was produced with its own cultural, political, or most commonly, economic motivation, but all contributed to a kind of index of ‘the town’. Topographical beauty was represented in impressive panoramic townscapes, and cultural institutions were illustrated in small wood-engraved vignettes in guidebooks and directories. A town’s commercial or ‘industrial’ character could be represented in each of these forms, as well as the additional arena of advertising and promotional imagery. Thus, visual representations constitute not merely an additional perspective for historians, but arguably the most valuable resource for understanding past attitudes to urbanisation. Nevertheless, excepting the work of a few historians such as Simon Gunn and Lynda Nead, the vast majority of studies of nineteenth-century urbanisation rely exclusively upon verbal, statistical, and cartographic evidence.³⁵ Such resources are crucial in establishing a chronology of sanitary improvement or when seeking an overview of the social structure. Yet, if, as Simon Gunn has suggested, the transformation of the urban environment at this time resulted in a ‘re-imagining’ of the urban sphere, then such resources are, by their nature, limited in their insights.³⁶ Unfortunately, Roy Porter’s long-standing challenge that ‘we still have a long way to go in seeing what people saw, and in interpreting the significance of visual signs’ remains unmet.³⁷ Where mortality statistics and town plans are the staple content of urban history, extensive studies of the ‘visual signs’ of the urban realm have, for the most part, been restricted to art historical and literary enquiries, most of which focus upon London.

London: an unrepresentative case study

Caroline Arscott’s essay, ‘The representation of the city in the visual arts’ is typical of the few recent attempts to produce a more visually aware analysis of the nineteenth-century urban environment. Taking London as a case study, Arscott addresses how the various features of the capital city were articulated in oil paintings and watercolours. ‘Urban folk’ as well as ‘leisure and consumption’ and the ‘urban fabric’ shape her account of nineteenth-century London.³⁸ However, although a justified subject for study, the physical reality and the image of London were far from representative of most nineteenth-century British towns. Covering a large geographical area, with an extensive history of commercial and political influence, architectural redevelopment, and cosmopolitan society, the metropolis exhibited a peculiarly rich picture of social variety, material degradation, and regeneration. The contrast between the capital and provincial towns and cities did not only become apparent with the benefit of hindsight as contemporary observers too were aware of the disparity. As the growing volume of prints and guidebooks acquainted readers and print viewers with the visual features of provincial towns and cities, the exceptional character of the capital became all the more appreciable. As Elizabeth McKellar notes, ‘with the realities of the variety of landscapes across the country now far better known, it was much harder to maintain the notion of the London landscape as representative of the entire nation’.³⁹ Yet, despite the peculiarity of London’s status and history, the majority of attempts to interpret visual images of provincial towns rely upon the characteristics and priorities of the metropolis.⁴⁰ This is problematic as the perceived ‘character’ of a place could be hugely affected by its association with a particular skyline, style of architecture, trades, politics, and cultural activities.

Although again focusing upon the capital, Donald J. Gray’s essay on nineteenth-century views and sketches of London provides some useful analytical models for urban imagery as it divides such material into two categories: the Canaletto-inspired ‘view’ and the Hogarthianinspired ‘sketch’.⁴¹ Employing these categories, Gray traces the developing representation of the capital throughout the century, identifying a duality in representations which convey both the density of the commercially active city alongside its physical monumentality. Nineteenth-century London is consequently conceptualised by Gray as an environment in which commerce and architectural grandeur were presented as compatible, even complementary characteristics: ‘the city is populous, busy and commercial. But what finally matters is the grandeur and space amid which its orderly traffic moves’.⁴² In relation to Thomas Hosmer Shepherd’s lithographs he observes that ‘the great buildings and historic places exist in the city, whose life moves past and over them on its own manifold business and urgencies’.⁴³ In this way, Gray presents a convincing image of the integration of history and modernity within the metropolis. The attitudes towards London that Gray identifies should not be taken as representative of those towards all British towns, but his observations do suggest that traditional aesthetic judgements of the urban environment and judgements associated with commerce and manufacturing operated in a more complex and integrated fashion than has hitherto been appreciated.

As Gray’s taxonomy illustrates, previous research into urban imagery has also privileged the work of widely recognised figures from the art-historical canon. Certainly, in the majority of studies, authors’ attention is restricted to ‘high’ art and oil paintings rather than printed images, ephemeral objects or other forms of visual display.⁴⁴ In addition to supplying an exclusively luxury market, painted views of towns represented a very particular and often unrepresentative vision of the urban scene. Unlike engravings, woodcuts, and the transfer prints that decorate ceramics, the malleability of oil paint and watercolour enabled artists to replicate atmospheric effects and subtle tonal distinctions with great accuracy. Consequently, painted views of townscapes tend to emphasise Romantic and evocative visual components rather than the fine details, text, and characters that are found in many printed views, advertisements, and ceramics. In challenging the bias towards high art images of the capital city, this book addresses visual representations of a number of provincial towns that were undergoing expansion and industrialisation throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, more specifically, printed, ephemeral material. The towns which will provide the main case studies include Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, and Sheffield. Although these towns should not be considered entirely ‘representative’ of the urban scene, they belong to a group of conurbations that underwent significant political, economic, social, and cultural transformations that were well documented visually.⁴⁵ Each of these sites relied upon different industries and trades and experienced differing rates of expansion and recession that defined their shape