Emily Chung

Cotton mills in Ancoats about 1820.

The Industrial Revolution drastically changed the way people lived, worked, and socialised in Britain’s large towns and cities. England rapidly urbanised in the first half of the 19th century as the country’s population moved from the agrarian countryside into growing centres of industrial activity, drawn in by the promise of work.  

Manchester, which represented the heart of the textile industry during this period, more than tripled in population size from 1800-1850 and epitomised early urbanisation in industrial Britain — as well as the problems that came with it. Accounts of the city in this period describe grand boulevards lined with the ‘palaces of merchant princes’ and punctuated by factories and warehouses, but also the cramped and dirty alleyways filled with poverty and disease which lay just beyond them.  

Locals and visitors alike painted scenes where the rich and the poor rarely, if ever, interacted and where the former were kept (or chose to remain) ignorant of the plight of the latter. As a result, Manchester has come to exemplify the class divisions of 19th century England. 

Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, Victoria Street, Manchester; Manchester Art Gallery.

Many historians have used these sources as evidence of spatial segregation: they assume that different classes lived in different parts of the city, so the upper and middle classes were kept safely away from the working-class poor. While this offers a tidy explanation for class segregation, however, divisions in industrial Manchester were the result of factors which went beyond residential patterns. Evidence from the 1851 census in fact shows that individuals of very different economic positions lived not only in the same districts of the city, but even in the same buildings!  

So how do we reconcile the experience of class division which arises from all these primary source narratives, with the fact that individuals of very different occupational backgrounds actually lived in close proximity to each other throughout the city? If we shift our perspective, we can see that social segregation arose more as the result of differences in routines and habits, often based around working patterns, rather than from spatial separation. 

House and home

With Manchester growing so quickly in the first half of the 19th century, developers scrambled to keep up by building dense blocks of housing. The structure of these buildings, however, included natural divisions which facilitated social separation.  

In the early 19th century, housing in northern industrial towns typically took the form of ‘one-up, one-down’ terrace houses with one unit on the ground floor (or just above), one unit on the first floor, and often, a subterraneous cellar with separate access to the street. This organisation meant that the middle classes could occupy the more ‘respectable’ main units, while the cold and dirty, but affordable cellars could be rented out by working class households. These cellars were often in loathsome conditions: cold, damp and suffering from sewage runoff, and this squalor — along with their density — contributed to the very poor health of the working classes. 

Dwellings of Manchester Operatives. Wellcome Collection.

 These buildings were often found in a ‘back-to-back’ arrangement which created the crowded alleyways mentioned in the primary sources; it is likely that front street units may have been rented at higher rates, forcing those with fewer means into the ‘back streets’ of Manchester.

Sylvia Melland, “Back Street, Manchester“. Manchester Art Gallery.

Through these conventions, households of very different social statuses could live very close by to each other, yet maintain entirely separate arenas of domestic space. And in the world beyond, differences in routines and elements of cultures of class continued to reinforce spatial divisions between the working-class poor and the rest of society. 

Rhythms of the industrial workday

According to the census of 1851, over half of Manchester’s employed population worked in the manufacturing and production sectors — and particularly the textile industry. Factories opened early in the morning and ran until late in the evenings six days a week, leaving their workers with little time for much else. By the time the middle and upper classes made their way to their own places of work, or as they ran their errands and carried out social visits during the day, the working classes were shuttered away in smoke-filled factories and crowded warehouses.  

A. A. Ward, Half-Timers; Greater Manchester County Record Office.

The payment schedules of the industrial sector further dictated the habits of the working class: as most working-class households lived week-to-week, the running of errands was reserved for Saturday evenings, right after factory operatives were paid. At this end of the work week, the urban poor flocked to Manchester’s markets in the hopes of finding enough food to last them through the following week. Unfortunately for them, the best and freshest items had usually been picked off by the middle classes and domestics earlier in the week, leaving them with little but scraps and the least desirable of products.

While the more comfortable classes could frequent smaller shops and boutiques, the limited means of the working classes forced them towards less reputable black- and off-market traders and the city’s few soup kitchens.  

The Society of Friends’ Soup-kitchen, Ball Street, Lower Moseley Street, Manchester. Wellcome Collection.

The nature of the industrial workweek, therefore, was such that it determined not only who could buy what, but also when.  These divisions in Victorian society were apparent even in the few hours and days that the lower classes did have off work. 

Cultures of class

A common theme throughout accounts from this period is the working-class propensity for drink in comparison to the religious fervour of the middle class. 19th century Manchester had over 300 public drinking houses, and these establishments tended to be the first to open and the last to close. Beyond the promise of beer or gin, these pubs offered warmth and conviviality — often a welcome escape from the cold, dark cellars which housed many of the working-class poor. Before and after work, as well as on Sundays when factories and warehouses were closed, the men, women, and even children of the lower classes gathered in the city’s many pubs to drink and socialise.  

In contrast, the middle and upper classes reserved Sundays for attending religious services. Religion was a key element of Victorian society, and in Manchester, it was associated with civic participation — both aspects of urban life which the middle and upper middle classes drew on to signal their ‘respectability’. Manchester’s Unitarian community, in particular, was made up of many of the city’s most influential figures who encouraged Liberal reforms in the city.  

Churches and chapels became places to see and be seen, yet the absence of the working classes was conspicuous. The middle and upper classes often blamed rampant alcoholism and general ‘immorality’ for this absenteeism, yet surviving accounts suggest that shame and resentment were common experiences which kept the urban poor away: a lack of proper clothing and cleanliness discouraged many for attending; while others turned away from these institutions, which they felt had offered little help in their times of need. These issues of ‘immorality’ and ‘respectability’ did much to define the habits of the rich and the poor, as the pub and the church came to represent opposite spaces in this divide.  

Eyre Crowe, The Dinner Hour, Wigan; Manchester Art Gallery.

Other aspects of urban life contributed to this experience of class segregation in Manchester as well — the emerging police system, as well as the sanitary maintenance of the city, to name a few — and piece by piece, the economic, architectural, and cultural characters of the city converged to create conditions of social separation in the industrial city. 

References

‘On The Social Condition of the Working Classes in Manchester and the Surrounding Areas, January 10th 1852’, Manchester Times, 10 January 1852. 

Further reading

• Daunton, M. J., House and Home in the Victorian City: Working-Class Housing 1850-1914 (London, 1983). 
• Dennis, R., English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century: A Social Geography (CUP, 1984) pp. 44-109. 
• Gunn, S., ‘The Middle Class, Modernity, and the Provincial City: Manchester, c.1840-80’ in A. Kidd and D. Nicholls (eds) Gender, Civic Culture, and Consumerism (MUP, 1999) pp. 112-128. 
• Hewitt, M., Making Social Knowledge in the Victorian City: The Visiting Mode in Manchester 1832-1914 (Milton Park, 2020). 
•  Scola, R., ‘Food Markets and Shops in Manchester’, Journal of Historical Geography 1:2 (1975), 153-167. 
•  Seed, J., ‘Unitarianism, political economy and the antinomies of liberal culture in Manchester, 1830–50’, Social History 7:1 (1982), 1-25. 

Tags: class, industrial revolution, social history, urbanisation, wealth

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