census of 1851, as we have seen, showed that for the first time slightly more than half the population was urban. The period of fastest growth had been the decade 1821–31, but the increase was not much less during the succeeding twenty years. Most of what are now the principal cities of modern Britain continued to grow rapidly between 1831 and 1851: Manchester from 182,000 to 303,000; Leeds 123,000 to 172,000; Birmingham 144,000 to 233,000; Glasgow 202,000 to 345,000. Bradford, the fastest growing town in this period of the Industrial Revolution, had 13,000 inhabitants in 1801, 26,000 in 1821, and 104,000 by 1851. At the beginning of the century London (with nearly a million) was the only city with more than 100,000 population; by 1851 there were nine. This massive growth had come from both natural increase and immigration, the proportion differing considerably from town to town. In 1851 a half or more of the adult inhabitants of Leeds, Sheffield and Norwich had been born in the town: in Manchester, Bradford and Glasgow just over a quarter were natives; and in Liverpool the proportion was even less.
The facts of demography provided a foundation for the Victorians’ great debate about cities, but the debate focused on ‘problems’ rather than numbers. Harking back to a much older tradition of rural-urban dichotomy, in which country life was assumed to be the norm and cities an ‘unnatural’ development which required special explanation, conservative critics of the new towns concentrated their attention on what was wrong. Cobbett’s denunciation of London as ‘the great Wen’ is a picturesque and well-known example of this view. Reformers of a different stamp also joined the chorus of disapproval; and even pro-urbanites like the Reverend Robert Vaughan, who saw cities as centres of civilisation, adopted a problems approach. Vaughan’s book, The Age of Great Cities; or modern society viewed in its relation to intelligence, morals and religion (1843), was indicative of the interest in the subject from the 1840s. Preoccupation with the problems of cities, however, defined fairly rigidly the terms of the debate, and precluded any serious consideration of the process of urbanisation as such. It became almost fashionable in Victorian Britain for writers dealing with urban developments to adopt a sensational approach. Such accounts are valuable evidence of contemporary attitudes on a multitude of social situations which happened to develop in cities. They do not, as some later social historians apparently thought, tell us much about how and why the urbanisation of the population came about. As defenders of the cities in the 1840s, such as Edward Baines, editor of the Leeds Mercury, were quick to point out, many of the problems of the urban areas (sanitation, housing, education, religion) were equally prominent in the countryside. So that the problems as such cannot be used to define the nature of urbanisation. The growth of population and its concentration in cities of various sizes is the great social change to be noted here; the problems will be dealt with in succeeding chapters.
One of the more unfortunate impressions left by an older generation of historians and sociologists is that all large towns in the nineteenth century were more or less the same – that is, equally smoky, soulless and horrible to live in. The tendency to lump them all together, ignoring any modifying differences, was in part derived from contemporary caricatures like Dickens’ Coketown and encouraged by references in the 1840s to ‘Cottonopolis’ and ‘Worstedopolis’. This is very misleading. Quite apart from obvious regional differences in traditional culture and economic and social relationships, the impact of population increase was very uneven. Not all towns were in the position of a Bradford or a Liverpool. Virtually all towns did increase between 1831 and 1851, but in some instances the expansion was relatively modest. Cambridge, Chester, Exeter and Norwich were of this order. Too often our impressions of urban growth have been derived from an overconcentration on the northern textile towns, though even among them their problems were by no means identical. London, again, was sui generis. In 1851 it was still by far the largest British city, though its position relative to the rest of the population had changed. The contrast with all other cities remained:
‘London [wrote Friedrich Engels, the young businessman and future collaborator of Karl Marx] is unique, because it is a city in which one can roam for hours without leaving the built-up area and without seeing the slightest sign of the approach of open country. This enormous agglomeration of population on a single spot has multiplied a hundredfold the economic strength of the two and a half million inhabitants concentrated there.’9
Here the process of urbanisation had begun earliest, had gone farthest, and was more easily distinguishable as such than in the northern towns of the classic Industrial Revolution.
Closely associated, indeed often taken as synonymous with industrialism and urban growth, was the factory system. Objectively this was simply a system of concentrated large-scale production, using power machinery and large numbers of operatives, together with the correspondingly necessary social institutions. In the 1830s and 1840s the factory system was still mainly confined to the textile industries. The Factory Acts were designed to regulate working conditions in cotton and woollen mills, and the home of the factory system was assumed to be Lancashire, the West Riding of Yorkshire and parts of Scotland. To establish the unique characteristics of the factory system it was, and still is, customary to contrast it with the previous mode of production, the domestic system. This was small-scale, handicraft industry, organised through a middleman and carried on in the homes of the people, often in rural surroundings. In textiles, relics of this form of organisation of industry continued into the 1840s, side by side with the factory system. The handloom weaver remained as a sad reminder of an earlier and once-prosperous type of economy; and in times of distress the older hands could look back nostalgically to this alternative order.
The complexity, and often sheer incomprehensibility, of the factory system baffled many Victorians. A writer in 1886 remarked that after a hundred years it was still not understood.10 His father in 1842 had declared:
‘The Factory system is a modern creation; history throws no light on its nature, for it has scarcely begun to recognise its existence; the philosophy of the schools supplies very imperfect help for estimating its results, because an innovating power of such immense force could never have been anticipated.’
He emphasised its complete newness, and added, ‘the manufacturing population is not new in its formation alone: it is new in its habits of thought and action, which have been formed by the circumstances of its condition’. Nevertheless the factory system is ‘what statesmen call un fait accompli; it exists, and must continue to exist; it is not practicable, even if it were desirable, to get rid of it; millions of human beings depend upon the Factories for their daily bread’.11
With the last point there could be little argument during years of prosperity. But when the factories failed to supply millions of human beings with their daily bread, as was the case in the depressions of 1837–42, suppressed doubts and latent criticisms came to the surface, and the factory system was condemned as the source of all social ills. William Dodd, ‘a factory cripple’, was one such critic. Describing a visit to Leeds in 1841 (‘I drew near the town and … the tall chimneys of the factories became … visible through the dense clouds of smoke’), he noted ‘the many marks by which a manufacturing town may always be known, viz., the wretched, stunted, decrepit, and, frequently, the mutilated appearance of the broken-down labourers, who are generally to be seen in the dirty, disagreeable streets; the swarms of meanly-clad women and children, and the dingy, smoky, wretched-looking dwellings of the poor’.
The factory system was for him an unmitigated evil: ‘We see, on the one hand, a few individuals who have accumulated great wealth by means of the factory system; and, on the other hand, hundreds of thousands of human beings huddled together in attics and cellars, or crawling over the earth as if they did not belong to it.’12
By the 1840s the term factory system had ceased to be an objective description of a certain type of economic and social organisation, and had become a slogan or a convenient label for a complex of
