thus in mildly satirical vein a poetaster of the 1770s described the smart new cultural world of Georgian Britain. The sense of cultural transformation, of the new sociable importance of women, of new entertainments, of the secularisation of social life, is striking, acute – and exaggerated. As we shall see in this chapter, such changes do figure prominently in the dynamic, and increasingly pluralistic, cultural landscape of British cities during the Georgian era, but they were only part of the painting.

In contrast to the earlier period, there can be little question that cities and towns after 1700 became vital centres for cultural mixing and dissemination, affecting not only the elite classes but a good part of national society as well. The leading cities, particularly London and Edinburgh, became cultural bazaars, increasingly cosmopolitan, importing and translating cultural ideas, goods and practices from continental Europe and beyond. Urban communities became exposition centres, exhibiting the fashionable models of cultural activity, whether performances of Handel’s oratorios, meetings of a newly established learned society or the latest taste in furnishings, dress or speech. Yet British cities in the Georgian era were more than sites or stages for cultural exchange: they were also seedbeds of innovation.

every schoolchild knows that an Industrial Revolution in late eighteenth-century Britain was followed by massive, rapid, urbanisation; that technological change created a world in which people interacted with nature and each other through work in new ways, and therefore lived different kinds of lives in places of a sort previously unknown; that the innovation of powered machinery sucked the British population into factory towns at hitherto remote locations. These novitiate certainties are a stark contrast to the disagreements of expert historians about the nature of economic development and urban growth, and the ways in which they were related, in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

There has been vigorous argument about what, exactly, the Industrial Revolution was ever since the term was first used. Recently, econometric analysis has even brought its very existence into question: whether the structure or growth trend of the British economy changed significantly before the 1840s is now hotly disputed. The high rates of urbanisation standing proudly in the statistical rubble created by this demolition job are not as incongruous as they might once have seemed. Complementary attacks on the idea that there was an Industrial Revolution in late eighteenth-century Britain, based on hypotheses about the processes of change rather than on trends in economic series, stress the continuing overweening significance of London through the eighteenth century, and are replacing Thomas Gradgrind’s Coketown with Samuel Pickwick’s Eatanswill as the fictional exemplar of provincial urban life.

INTRODUCTION: LONDON IN EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE

London’s growth was a phenomenon of European importance in our period. At the start, London was already a major capital city, ranking sixth in terms of size in mid-sixteenth-century Europe (see Table 10.1). It was dwarfed by the Italian city of Naples and was much smaller than either Venice (ranked second) or Paris (ranked third); and it was outnumbered by the Portuguese capital of Lisbon and London’s principal trading partner, Antwerp. Within fifty years all this had changed. By 1600 London was ranked third in Europe after Naples and Paris, and its neighbour and erstwhile trading partner, Antwerp, was nowhere. Continued growth meant that London came second only to Paris by 1650 and by the end of the seventeenth century was the biggest European city containing some half a million people.

London then developed from a modest capital city, with an economy largely dependent on the export of woollen cloth, to a metropolis at the heart of the European economy. Over our period its population spilled out from the original relatively densely populated districts of the City within and without the Walls (see Plate 1) to form an urban conurbation stretching from Wapping and Poplar in the east to Westminster in the west. Its economic impact on the nation expanded from the immediately adjacent counties to the entire nation, including its overseas colonies. The task of this chapter is to provide some idea of how this extraordinary growth was accomplished and what kind of economy and society it produced.

LONDON: PORTENT OF THE FUTURE

‘In 1737 Samuel Johnson, having failed to make a very successful living hitherto, made his way to London, at the age of twenty-eight, and wrote a gloomy prognostication of his chances of survival:

Johnson had not yet visited Scotland, or he might have revised his views on the comparative safety of life in the Highlands. It was in London that he found the company that he most longed to frequent and in London that he made his career. He did not leave London often and it was in London that he died forty-seven years after his arrival, having made his famous remark that a man who was tired of London was tired of life, as there was in London all that life could afford. Most of the poem had in fact little to do with London, although it was quite correct in pointing out that the capital had its highwaymen and that the older houses occasionally fell into the street. Johnson used London to typify decadence This was, from one point of view, part of an anti-urban tradition that long predated Johnson and long outlived him.

INTRODUCTION

towns in early modern Britain performed many commercial, manufacturing, service, legal, political and cultural functions, and these were unevenly distributed. Even capitals as dominant as London and Edinburgh did not contain all the activities found in their respective urban systems, and different towns performed varying combinations of functions, whose fortunes shaped significant restructurings of British urban systems over this period. Urban production and trade, and their regulation, involved townspeople acting in various local, regional and national contexts. Many facets of urban life were tightly intertwined with hinterlands, and interdependences of town and country were central to many urban economic sectors. While some historiographical tension persists between work focusing on contrasting features of urban and rural life, and work focusing on urban–rural (and urban–urban) connections, the foci are substantially complementary. Contrasts grew as connectivity increased, with growing spatial divisions of labour in economic, political, social or cultural activities. This chapter considers urban life, insofar as it was distinctive, through the specialised roles connecting towns with other places. We interpret ‘agrarian’ broadly, since rural economies were seldom solely agricultural.

In comparative studies of European urbanisation, threshold populations of 5,000 or 10,000 have often been used, and for the demographic analysis of British towns this makes sense. But from an economic perspective very many much smaller places were unambiguously regarded as towns by contemporaries for whom functions, rather than population, provided ‘urban’ attributes. Sixteenth-century urban economic specialisations were less marked than later, but earlier commentators readily – if unsystematically – characterised towns by their specialised functions.

walking the streets of Birmingham for the first time in 1803, John Francis, a Nottinghamshire lad, ‘gazed and stared at everything that he saw that his eyes were bloodshot … and his mouth being open … he was almost choked with dust’. Such wonder at the sight of early nineteenth-century British towns was not confined to poor folk up from the country. The Franco-American businessman, Louis Simond, ‘approached Leeds at night and from a height, north of the town, we saw a multitude of fires issuing, no doubt from furnaces, and constellations of illuminated windows (manufactories) spread over the dark plain’. Streets of good-looking shops, the vast, fire-proof clothiers’ hall, the merchants’ walk, the hospital with its good order and cleanliness, the library, and the many houses, a great part ‘modern and comfortable, with gardens, planted squares, and flowers in every window’, all impressed him.

A bird’s eye view of the island’s cities and towns on the accession of Victoria would have seen them progressively bound together by the sinuous chains of navigable rivers, canals, improved roads and the new railways (see Plate 31), carrying unprecedented volumes of commercial and other traffic. Less visible but no less vital for integrating the urban system were the links forged by capital markets, by the growing postal system, by the London and provincial press, and by the imperative of cultural fashion. Certainly the British urban system had advanced dramatically over the period, particularly since the seventeenth century. This is in marked contrast to other parts of Europe, where early advanced urban networks (as in the southern Netherlands) had suffered major reverses and only started to revive towards the end of our period; or where (as in the case of the Dutch Randstad) highly integrated city systems actually deurbanised in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; or where, as in France, many cities were in decline after the French Revolution; or where, as in Scandinavia, towns were only slowly waking up from a bucolic past.

were the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the first to define, for British people, ‘the urban experience’? In broad terms, the answer to this would have to be in the negative, since the pattern of major towns, at least in England and Scotland, was already long-established, and the sixteenth century’s increase in population can be seen as a phase of recovery as much as of expansion. On the other hand, it is in this period that London emerges as a European metropolis and as England’s capital city, that urbanisation becomes linked with national identity and centralised government, and that the proportion of those resident in towns, or sharing in the experience of towns in some phase of life, begins to accelerate. In this chapter, urbanisation will first be examined in demographic terms, with reference to migration, fertility, marriage and mortality, especially in relation to subsistence and the shift from epidemic to endemic causes of death. The second section explores contemporary sensibilities and social structure as affected by changes in the pattern of disease and in the urban environment, touching on gender, work and poverty, and contemporary ideas about population, crowding and urban life. By ‘environment’ we mean, in particular, factors affecting townspeople’s sense of the presence of others. The final section analyses the ambivalent character of two staple sources of reassurance, household and neighbourhood, which provided continuity but which can be shown to be open to challenge and renegotiation from within and without as urban pressures intensified.

provoked by the French charge that there was ‘never a good town in England, only London’, the English herald in the Debate of the Heralds of 1549 was moved to respond at length: ‘I pray you, what is Berwick, Carlisle, Durham, York, Newcastle, Hull, Northampton, Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester, Coventry, Lichfield, Exeter, Bristol, Salisbury, Southampton, Worcester, Shrewsbury, Canterbury, Chichester?’ All these, and more, ‘if they were in France, should be called good towns’.

The herald’s list of twenty towns embraces between a third and a half of the fifty or so regional centres and major county towns of England which – with their equivalents in Scotland and Wales – are the subject of this chapter. It also contains fourteen – almost one half – of the thirty-one largest English provincialm towns in the early sixteenth century, which are enumerated in Table 11.1 below. It is evident from the other six towns nominated by the herald, however, that size of population was not the only criterion for entry in his list. Lichfield, Chichester, Durham and Carlisle were there because, like others, they were cathedral cities, Hull because it was another important port, Berwick as a vital frontier citadel. Without some of these, moreover, the thinly populated North of England would scarcely have been represented at all. Status and function were as important as size in defining good towns.

The special features of the towns of the Home Counties and adjoining shires which these quotations illustrate were the result of several factors. Unlike much of the Midlands communications were good except in the Weald. Essex, Kent, Sussex and Hampshire had a big coastal traffic which was more sheltered than that of North-East England. Inland counties were tied by the Thames and a growing number of navigable tributaries, and the Ouse linked Bedfordshire to the Wash.

INTRODUCTION: A VARIETY OF URBAN POLITICAL FORMS

the political history of towns in early modern Europe is conventionally depicted in terms of their growing subservience to the expanding state which underpinned the consolidation of oligarchy, the displacement of merchants and craftsmen on town councils by royal officeholders and the penetration of civic government by the rural elites. It is a model which has proved influential in approaching the history of towns in the British archipelago. The later seventeenth century, in particular, is seen as a period when calculations of parliamentary electoral advantage led the crown and rural elites into massive interventions in urban affairs which curbed their autonomy. However, many of the assumptions underpinning the model have been under attack. In view of the weakness of its own resources the power of the centre could only advance by means of compromises with local groups; likewise municipal magistrates could only hope to implement their policies by involving craftsmen and tradesmen in local administration; and changes in our understanding of patronage relationships have led to the realisation that interventions by the rural elites often occurred at the instigation of townsfolk anxious to exploit the relationship with outsiders to their own ends. Civic ideals may well have retained more strength in 1700 than is often recognised, and this chapter will argue that they remained an important force in blunting the very real ideological divisions released by the Reformation and reinforced by the legacies of the conflicts of the Civil Wars and the Exclusion Crisis.

THE FOUNDATIONS

the topography of British towns at the beginning of the sixteenth century was the product of the interaction between successive generations of men and women living in society, and the opportunities and constraints presented by their environment over the preceding millennium. Volume I of this work, more especially Chapters 8 and 16, gives an account of the medieval antecedents to this chapter.

Of all the features of towns inherited from the medieval centuries, the street plan, once laid down, has proved to be the most enduring, matched only by the similar longevity of the boundaries of the burgage plots which composed the spaces between the streets. The layout of both could be profoundly affected by the line of any fortifications which might be present. By the end of the medieval period well over a hundred English and Welsh towns had been fortified, including Coventry, Southampton, Hereford and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, ‘the strength and magnificens of the waulling of this towne’, Leland thought, ‘far passith al the waulles of the cities of England and of most of the townes of Europa’. Numerous others, including Aylesbury, Chelmsford and Trowbridge, were not fortified, whilst in some cathedral cities the close formed a separate fortified enceinte, as at Salisbury.

Many town walls were, by the beginning of this period, ruinous, and there was much encroaching and piecemeal destruction. A survey of Oswestry made in 1602 revealed great waste made on the castle, with stones carried away by the wagon load and whole towers taken down, with the gates of the town all very ruinous except Churchgate, where the burgesses had made their election house.

industrial towns in the early nineteenth century were seen as sources of social and economic problems. ‘Degeneracy’, wrote Richard Ayton in Swansea in 1813, ‘results from the increase of manufactories, and the consequent attraction of a larger population to one point’. The expansion of manufactures was perceived during the debate on the ‘Condition of England’ question in the early 1840s to be responsible for many social ills, some of which were urban. The town of the mid-nineteenth century has come to be represented by a series of pessimistic images, like the view of the cotton mills alongside the Rochdale Canal at Ancoats, Manchester, published by George Pyne in 1829, and by several much-quoted descriptions: Engels and de Tocqueville on Little Ireland in Manchester, or Reach on the east end of Leeds. Peter Gaskell summarised a popular perception when he observed that ‘the universal application of steam-power … separates families; and … lessens the demand for human strength, reducing man to a mere watcher or feeder of his mighty assistant’.

Contemporaries were nevertheless aware that the development of manufactures was not synonymous with urban growth, that the factory system needed to be understood in rural as well as in urban contexts, at Egerton and Styal as well as in Manchester and Leeds. None of the industries which most conspicuously expanded in the century before 1840 – coal mining, textiles, the mining and processing of non-ferrous metals, ironmaking, hardware, glassmaking, ceramics – was essentially urban. Towns were significant in these industries, but they encompassed much activity outside urban limits.

Malebranche was the master of an elegant and accessible style of writing. As well as writing treatises, he popularized his philosophy by presenting it in dialogue form. Moreover, he also taught what many thinking people wished to believe, that the “modern” philosophy of Descartes could, after all, be reconciled with traditional Christian beliefs. As a result, he had a considerable following among lay people of the leisured classes, at the Academy of Sciences in Paris, as well as among those, like some of the clergy, who made philosophy part of their profession. His aristocratic admirers included the Palatine Princess Elizabeth - noted as a correspondent of Descartes - and Mile. Nicole-Geneviève de Vailly, who assembled a company of Malebranchistes in her salon each week. His disciples included some other Oratorians, such as Bernard Lamy, whose influence helped to mediate Malebranche to the philosophes of the French Enlightenment. One of his most faithful followers was the Jesuit priest Yves-Marie André, who wrote the first biography. His admirers also included the mathematicians Pierre Rémond de Montmort and the Marquis de l'Hôpital. He also found a significant following in Italy, where his influence was felt by Vico and other philosophers right into the nineteenth century. A considerable upsurge of interest in Malebranche occurred in England in the 1690s and early 1700s, when a number of his major works were translated. Malebranche's popularity declined in both England and France as Locke came to be regarded as the philosopher of the age. However, there was a revival of support in mid-eighteenth century France and a corresponding upsurge of criticism of Locke.

The twentieth century has done much in the way of transforming the life and work of Malebranche into a cultural legacy. The effects of this transformation are first making themselves felt only now, at the end of the century. At the very least, the century that begins with the year 2000 will have at its disposal all it needs to study and explain his oeuvre, if not to grasp it in full. The history of philosophy is now fully equipped and ready to take possession of that oeuvre and thereby procure for itself entirely new opportunities. The publication of the Oeuvres completès provides us with all the available texts attributable to Malebranche; in the past fifty years only a single new letter has been found! The method used in compiling this monumental collection gathered together the variations of all the recorded editions. I am not speaking of handwritten manuscripts,- for as much as we can avail ourselves of interesting paleographic approaches in the case of Leibniz and Descartes, in the case of Malebranche we cannot return to the primordial state of the texts' composition.

However, in fact, Malebranche considered the previous editions of his books to be the rough drafts - so much so that the work published during his lifetime is only one long rough draft worth all the unpublished writings at Hanover. Evidence for this is found in the fact that there is no permanent dogmatism in any of these writings. The author's retrospection, as well as his conflicts with other philosophers, led him to take account of the objections that were made to him in a way quite different from that in which Descartes responded to the objections that he received. Descartes' thought remained subservient to the necessity of what he was demonstrating; it progresses in an involuted way.

The topic of theodicy looms large in Malebranche's thought. His distinctive views on the subject form the basis of one of his most famous books, the Treatise on Nature and Grace (1680), and occupy a prominent place in important later works such as the Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688). Embracing issues of the relation of the divine will to creation and our knowledge of that will, Malebranche's theodicy is inextricably linked to his signature doctrines of occasionalism and vision in God. Together, they form a single comprehensive theory that attempts to explicate the existence and nature of the world, and the special place of human beings within it, in relation to God as creator.

What has come to be called the problem of theodicy signifies a cluster of issues, some of which any theological explanation of the world's existence must confront, others of which are specifically associated with the tenets of Christian theology. Of the first sort are basic questions about the world's imperfection and what this implies about God's apparent lack of concern for the welfare of human beings. If God is all powerful, all wise, and all good, why does he permit natural circumstances (floods, earthquakes, and drought) that are unworthy of his perfection and that bring harm to human beings, particularly the innocent who have done nothing to earn God's punishment? Why does God allow wicked people to exercise their wickedness in harming the innocent, and then, apparently, fail to punish the wicked, who profit from their evil deeds? Questions such as these strike at the fundamental justice of God's action: How could God allow such things to happen, unless he is in some way limited by less than supreme goodness, knowledge, or power?

The title of Malebranche's first, longest, and most important work might well have been Discourse on Method, for method is what The Search After Truth is most obviously about. Its subtitle adumbrates the centrality of method: wherein are treated the nature of man's mind and the use he must make of it to avoid error in the sciences. The importance of finding a method to avoid error is expressed in the first sentence of the Search's first book: “error is the cause of men's misery” for from it comes the evil that upsets human happiness. Each of the five major occasions of error is detailed by the first five books of the work, and the last book, on method, indicates “the paths leading to knowledge of the truth ” [Search VI.1.i, OC 2:245; LO 408). The method that Malebranche proposes is, like his vision of all things in God, a highly original result of correcting Descartes in light of the Christianized Platonism that he received from Augustine.

The seventeenth century was the belle époque of method. The prominence of scientific advance in the period was such that extreme epistemic optimism was pandemic. It seemed that among rationalists everything was knowable and would soon be known, and that even among empiricists who set limits to human knowledge, those limits would soon be achieved. A sharp break from all precedent was universally perceived; these moderns felt that they were uniquely doing something right, and somehow doing it systematically given the results being achieved, thus the preoccupation with the discovery and articulation of method. (Whether the break with the past was as sharp as the moderns thought is, of course, another question. Nor did the pandemic optimism preclude the period from also being the belle epoche of skepticism.)