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concealment convenient for them.’
1
His optimism found, especially in the less
fearful and conflict-ridden mid-Victorian age, increasing echoes amongst men
like himself, born and bred in the cities with the same middle-class,
Nonconformist dislike and suspicion of the rural-based, anti-urban aristocracy,
men such as Edward Baines, editor of the Leeds Mercury, Joseph Chamberlain
of Birmingham, and Joseph Cowen, owner of the Newcastle Chronicle, who
wrote in 1877:
The gathering of men into crowds has some drawbacks, yet the
concentration of citizens, like the concentration of soldiers, is a source of
strength. The ancient boroughs were the arks and shrines of freedom.
Today, behind the dull roar of our machinery, the bellowing of our blast
furnaces, the panting of the locomotives and the gentle ticking of the
electric telegraph…we can hear the songs of children who are fed and clad,
and the acclaim of a world made free by these agencies. When people
declaim in doleful numbers against the noise and dirt of the busy centres of
population, they should remember the liberty we enjoy as a consequence of
the mental activity and enterprise which have been generated by the contact
of mind with mind brought together in great towns.
2
Both sides were right of course, in their different ways. The enormously rapid
growth not only of the new industrial but of most towns and cities during the
Industrial Revolution did create new social problems and aggravate and expand
the scale of old ones. Amongst the more important of these was the new problem
of insecurity created by fluctuations in employment amongst concentrated
masses of wage-earners without natural protectors to turn to in distress, to add to
the old problem of the chronically depressed and abandoned urban poor. Closely
connected with both was the vast increase in crime and prostitution which
occurred in the towns in the first half of the nineteenth century, and swelled to a
new peak in every economic slump. The home of these was in the slums, with
their squalid living conditions, overflowing privies, cess-pools and drains, foul
water supplies, and excessive disease and death rates for the people forced to
inhabit them. Finally, and connected with all these, there was the increasing
1
Cf. W.Cobbett, Rural Rides (Everyman, 1948), I. 43, 65–6, 226, II. 9, 18, 55–6, 80, 128,
226, amongst many other anti-urban references to ‘wens’; J.Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of
Architecture (1849), p. 359; W.Cooke Taylor, Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing
Districts of Lancashire (1842), pp. 12–13; J.Fletcher, ‘Moral and Educational Statistics of
England and Wales’, Stat.J., 1847, X. 193f.
2
Fletcher, loc. cit., X. 198–200, 214.
3
A.de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland (ed. J.P.Mayer, 1958), pp. 104–8;
Faucher, op. cit., p. 19; Engels, op. cit., chap. iii; H.Taine, Notes on England (trans.
W.F.Rae, 1874), pp. 273–5, 283–5; G.Doré and W.B.Jerrold, London (1872).
1
R.Vaughan, The Age of Great Cities (1843), in Briggs, Victorian Cities, p. 61.
132 SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF INDUSTRIALISM