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Themes
Browse by subject to discover a wide variety of primary and critical materials on our key topics: Class and Work, Agencies and Institutions, Crime and Punishment, States of Mind, Health and Welfare, Family and Demography, Recreation and Consumption, Rural and Urban Life, Race and Empire and Gender and Sexuality. These short introductions offer a concise overview of ten key areas within British society and have been written by our academic editors, Professor Martin Hewitt and Susie Steinbach.. Click on a subject tile to read an overview of the category and view the relevant primary source documents, secondary source book chapters, journal articles and thematic essays.
- Agencies and Institutions
- Class and Work
- Crime and Punishment
- Family and Demography
- Gender and Sexuality
- Health and Welfare
- Race and Empire
- Recreation and Consumption
- Rural and Urban Life
- States of Mind
During the long nineteenth century, rural and urban life were simultaneously contrasting and intimately linked. On the one hand, the long nineteenth century saw Britain become an urban society. At the start of the eighteenth century, 75% of British and Irish people lived in rural areas, but Britain was becoming increasingly urban. With every passing decade, cities became larger and more crowded. The 1851 census revealed that England was the first country in the world to pass an important milestone: more English people now lived in cities and towns than in the countryside (Wales, Scotland, and Ireland were still majority rural societies). From the early twentieth century all of Britain (though not Ireland) was an urban society (with town and country connected through networks of transportation, production, and consumption).
Rural Britain remained important, not least because it was so large; in 1911 96.7% of the acreage of Wales and England, and more of Ireland and Scotland, was rural space. Internal migration meant that many city-dwellers had immigrated from the surrounding countryside, and so had some experience of rural life. Cities and industry were concentrated in the southeast; northern England was very rural, as was Scotland. In his 1905 book Riches and Poverty, L Chiozza Money called the United Kingdom “an empty country dotted with small crowded spots called towns.” Most of the rural land across Britain was owned by the aristocracy, whose land was rented and farmed by thousands of people, most of whom lived in small, shabby cottages and many of whom were very poor (one response to rural poverty was migration to the cities in search of work). At the same time, nostalgia led to the idea that the true Britain was a rural Britain and to the rise of the ‘pastoral’ mode.
Urban Britain was in the ascendancy. Glasgow’s population was 330,000 in 1851 and 785,000 in 1911. Manchester’s population was 400,000 in 1851 and 2.3 million in 1911. London’s population was 2.6 million in 1851 and seven million in 1911 (more than the entire population of England and Wales in 1700). In 1890, almost half of the population of the United Kingdom lived in cities of 20,000 or more people. Urban spaces were crowded, exciting, and dangerous, especially for women—there were fierce debates over where and how women could negotiate urban spaces. Life in cities was more anonymous than life in small villages; for example, young people courted one another—and deserted one another—without family or community oversight. For some, anonymity was an opportunity to remake themselves; for others, the problems of authenticity and trust abounded on the crowded city streets. City streets swarmed with pedestrians, commuters, delivery boys, street sweepers, vendors, beggars, and shoppers of all sorts. City centers featured music halls and libraries and museums, but also slums, and from mid-century there were housing and sanitary reforms that attempted to solve the problem of slums. City parks were seen as important green spaces and as the lungs of cities.
This Routledge Historical Resource contains collections of primary sources that focus explicitly on rural and urban issues, including The English Rural Poor, 1850-1914, The Urban Working Class in Britain, 1830–1914 and London Labour and the London Poor.
Monographs on the themes of rural and urban in the Resource include, for rural life, Rural Disorder and Police Reform in Ireland, 1812-36, The Land and the People of Nineteenth Century Cork, Village Life and Labour; and for urban life, Urban Poverty in Britain 1830-1914, Patterns of European Urbanisation Since 1500, and The Idea of the City in Nineteenth-Century Britain.
- Agencies and Institutions
- Class and Work
- Crime and Punishment
- Family and Demography
- Gender and Sexuality
- Health and Welfare
- Race and Empire
- Recreation and Consumption
- Rural and Urban Life
- States of Mind