much of the broad panoply of everyday life: consumption, communication, and movement. Because of relatively high prices and low working-class wages, all three developed a largely middle-class clientele in the late nineteenth century. My examination of these institutions has uncovered a consistent reorganization of space and time in all three, beginning in the late nineteenth century. To put it simply, space and time became more precisely organized and increasingly subject to human definition and control. These changes took place not only within the organizations I study but on the streets of the city and throughout bourgeois life in general. Historians have found a desire for exacting classification and organization nearly everywhere in Victorian bourgeois society, both in not-for-profit enterprises like public libraries, museums, and universities and in businesses. These changes took place in public spaces (office and factory buildings) and in private ones (the middle-class home). Scholars have noted this new bourgeois world-view in education (in the creation of universities and new disciplines—the social sciences—and in methodology), in architecture (in both the layout of middle-class homes and more complex commercial structures), in business (careful classification was the “science” in scientific management), in knowledge (library cataloging), and in the presentation of time (timepieces and timetables).13
Within the three specific middle-class commercial enterprises that I have examined in Philadelphia, this increased specialization of space and new dominion over time are abundantly clear. The department store was more than just an expanded dry goods emporium; it was an entirely new way of organizing and presenting merchandise for sale. The arrangement of the store, in both management structure and interior layout, manifested the classification of people and things. Its very name highlights the importance of departmentalization to the process. Retail managers also extended control over time. It was during this period that they invented the retail calendar, with its “White Sales” and similarly created events. The complex interiors of the urban railroad stations likewise reflected this specialization in space, while the railways’ schedules placed in printed form the modernization of time. Victorian newspaper editors carefully defined the layout of their journals; they created sports and business pages, women’s columns, and dedicated spaces for international, national, and local news.
By actively using all three of these commercial institutions, the women and men of Philadelphia’s middle class not only mentally reconstructed their metropolis but also helped to physically reshape the city between 1876 and 1926. Commuter trains and streetcars had the most dramatic—and direct—effects on the landscape as they allowed the bourgeoisie to define specialized areas in the region. Middle-class men and women took these vehicles to the Jersey shore and Willow Grove Park for amusement; to Center City for work, shopping, and entertainment; to the ballparks on the industrial fringe for sports; to Fairmount Park for recreation; and to the neighborhoods and the suburbs for home and rest. The steel rails of these “bourgeois corridors” allowed the middle class to categorize space in the metropolis and to reconstruct their vision of the region. The department stores served as middle-class havens of order in the heart of the city. Drawing bourgeois women and men to downtown from places like West Philadelphia, Germantown, and Haddonfield, the stores helped define a shared culture—based on consumption—throughout the region. Newspapers not only brought well-organized news and entertainment to middle-class homes and offices throughout the metropolis, but they also carried the retail advertisements and theatrical announcements that helped entice middle-class men and women to Center City via train and streetcar.14
Throughout late nineteenth-century bourgeois life in Philadelphia, space became better classified and time more precise and increasingly divorced from nature. By the early twentieth century the bourgeois world was well ordered and middle-class Philadelphians were willing to use their political power to force their vision of the city on recalcitrant others. At the same time, the economic forces that had helped create middle-class Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century started to undermine it. Ironically, the classifications developed by the Victorian bourgeoisie allowed many of the once exclusively middle-class commercial institutions (like department stores and newspapers) to reach broader markets as the culture of consumption expanded. Areas that had been almost solely bourgeois in the late nineteenth century became increasingly multi-classed in the early twentieth.
By the late nineteenth century, every problem in the middle-class world seemed ripe for a scientific solution. The Victorian bourgeoisie used the term “science” so often that many historians today no longer take the term seriously and treat the word as little more than a synonym for “good” or “new.” Nevertheless, middle-class women and men were being scientific—at least as far as they defined the term—in their reconstruction of society. To understand what they meant by science and what they thought they were doing, we have to go back to the early nineteenth century and look at what constituted science then. It was this conceptualization of science that the bourgeoisie learned in school and then applied to their world in the late nineteenth century.15
Today, educated men and women are reasonably confident of what they mean when they use the term “science.” It is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “in modern use, often treated as synonymous with ‘Natural and Physical Science’, and thus restricted to those branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the material universe and their laws.… This is now the dominant sense in ordinary use.” What the early twenty-first-century middle class recognizes as science is almost exclusively experimental: physics, chemistry, and biology. 16
In the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie was equally sure of what they meant by the term “science” and it incorporated more methodologies than just experimentation. Much of what we now call “technology” was then considered science, so engineering marvels like the steam locomotive, the massive iron and glass buildings of the Centennial, and the Brooklyn Bridge were all examples of scientific progress to Victorians. In addition, many nineteenth-century sciences, in particular the life sciences, had not adopted the experimental process that we today associate with science but had retained the rational models developed by Bacon and Newton during the Scientific Revolution. Perhaps the most significant scientific advancement of the nineteenth century, at least in popular culture, was made by Charles Darwin using one of these alternative methodologies. Darwin’s theory of evolution, which so sparked the bourgeois imagination, was based on taxonomy. One historian of science has written that “[t]he search for systematic schemes of classification [had] dominated the life sciences during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” and that same search for order captured the Victorian bourgeoisie in the nineteenth. 17
The Darwinian revolution in popular middle-class thought was two-fold. What has been well studied is how the theory of evolution became part of the bourgeois world view, along with a related concept known as Social Darwinism. But what has largely been missed is that besides offering a general theory, Darwin also offered an example of a scientific methodology to an increasingly well-educated middle class. This methodology—taxonomy—was reinforced by science courses offered in Victorian high schools and colleges. In addition, new disciplines, like the “social sciences,” and existing ones, such as the law, borrowed this methodology from the sciences and created detailed classifications of human behavior during this period. By the start of the twentieth century, taxonomy was commonplace throughout middle-class society.18
Because our conception of science has changed and because members of the middle class used the term so often during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is easy to overlook this metaphor as the basis of the bourgeoisie’s reconstruction of their world. Just as the middle class began to apply taxonomy throughout everyday life, the scientific community shifted away from classification to experimentation as its paradigm. Historians of other fields, well versed in their generations’ understandings of science, often seem unaware of the earlier traditions. As but one example, a legal historian recently claimed that “Langdell’s [a leading late-nineteenth-century law professor and the inventor of the casebook method of legal study] proudest boast was that the law was a science, and his method was scientific.
