The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  Many of the above themes are well illustrated in the growth of the capital city. In 1700 London had a population of about 500,000 souls, around 8 per cent of the entire population of England and Wales. By 1725 it had risen to 600,000 and by 1750 to about 660,000 out of a total English population of just over 6,000,000. London had all the attractions of a vast capital city, and its population benefited from a continuing stream of immigrants. On one estimate, no less than three-quarters of London’s population in the eighteenth century was born outside the capital. London remained an immense market for agricultural products but its economy began to change into that of a clearing house (or entrepot) for trade. In 1700 around one-quarter of the workforce had some connection with the port and its trades. Even London, however, could not keep up with the national pace of commercial expansion. Its proportion of all of England’s overseas trade was starting to fall – from three-quarters in 1700 to two-thirds in 1752. But its commercial importance was underlined by its financial activities, by the steady growth of the Bank of England, by the establishment and development of marine insurance at Lloyd’s and by the proliferation of financial services of all kinds. During the course of the century London replaced Amsterdam as the financial centre of Europe. Moreover, the cultural imperialism which London imposed on the rest of the country was almost as marked as its economic influence. Information about London fashion was easily available in the newspapers and reviews. No wonder Defoe called London ‘the great centre of England’.

  So imposing was the sheer critical, demographic mass of London that some historians are inclined to see ‘the making of the middle class’ in its huge and rapidly growing middling ranks.19 It is doubtful, however, if such a wildly heterogeneous mass of occupations, largely unaware of any common interests which they may have had, deserves the description ‘class’. The social structure of London was a closely integrated set of hierarchies, ascending and descending in minute gradations, perceptible to contemporaries by quite minor variations of speech, dress and manners which are often too subtle and too varied to be conveyed in documentary evidence. It is these, rather than the vaster and more homogeneous units of ‘class’, which remain typical of the middling orders even of London society in the middle of the eighteenth century.

  The social structure of the other great towns of the country was not dissimilar, although there can be no doubt about the uniqueness of London. Bristol and Norwich, the next two towns, still had populations of only 30,000 in 1700. Bristol then began to pull steadily ahead until by 1750 it stood second to London at 40,000, compared to the 36,000 of Norwich. The other great provincial capitals were smaller. Newcastle upon Tyne had 16,000 in 1700, rising to 30,000 in 1750; Plymouth went from 9,000 to 14,000 in 1750, Exeter from 14,000 to 16,000, Chester from 10,000 to 12,000, but York went down from 12,000 to 11,000. Manufacturing towns were by 1750 growing rapidly: Birmingham and Liverpool had shot up from around 10,000 to 20,000; Manchester and Leeds were still slightly under 20,000. Of the remaining towns in England, only Coventry, Ipswich, Nottingham and Yarmouth, and just possibly Bath, Hull and Sheffield, had populations over 10,000. With a very few exceptions, then, the towns of England were small in size. If we accept the figure of 2,500, beloved of urban historians, as the minimum population for a town, then in 1700 only one in six of the population lived in a town. Even by 1800 that figure had only reached one in three. In Scotland, Edinburgh had 45,000 inhabitants in 1700 and, in Ireland, Dublin had 60,000. The eighteenth century was a period of unprecedented growth for these two cities. By 1800, indeed, Dublin had a population of no fewer than 200,000 and even Cork was approaching 80,000. The growth in the size of other towns in Scotland and Ireland and, indeed, in that of the Welsh towns, was very much slower, at least before the later decades of the eighteenth century.

  During urbanization towns became centres for the services provided by the rapidly growing professions. Admission to the army, navy and church was still dominated by the aristocracy and gentry, but the expansion of professional opportunities was beginning to open doors to more humble aspirants, especially in the provinces. In this way, professional status and a common experience of professional life may have done something to integrate the different orders of society both nationally and locally. Admission both to the legal profession and to the growing ranks of physicians and apothecaries was more broadly based, through an apprenticeship system which permitted upward mobility from the humbler ranks of society. Even so, almost two-thirds of legal clerks came from gentry backgrounds, only one-third from the middling sort of merchants and professionals. The act of 1731 requiring legal proceedings to be conducted in English boosted the prosperity of the legal profession. The many and varied property transactions of an increasingly prosperous commercial society ensured its continuing health. The medical profession fared no less well. Town-dwellers were extremely health-conscious; this ensured an unceasing trail of visits to physicians and apothecaries. Although surgeons were the princes of the medical profession, the mania for medicine in these decades ensured that physicians, even in country towns, could make a reasonable living. Anxious parents, moreover, sought educational advantages for their children. This bred an enormous market for schoolmasters and mistresses, for day as well as boarding-schools, and for private tutors and governesses as well as a range of commercial needs such as bookkeeping, surveying and modern languages. In general, by the middle of the century most towns of any size boasted an impressive number of professional men and women who were anxious to sell their services both to townspeople and to those from the local rural hinterland. Manchester and Leeds had around 20 attorneys to cater for their populations of 20,000 in the 1730s, while, with a smaller population, Penzance had no fewer than 11. Overall, it has been estimated by Professor Holmes20 that the number of professional men in permanent employment increased by no less than 70 per cent between 1680 and 1730, to about 70,000.

  There was no cultural schism between the elites of town and country whatever their political and religious differences. Prosperous members of the middling ranks of society used urban environments in order to express both their wealth and their values, but this was an urban culture in which the rural elite might involve itself. Indeed, the invasion of the towns by the rural elite was much more marked than the purchase of landed estates by rich members of the urban, middling classes. The aristocracy and gentry took to patronizing urban centres with some relish. Indeed, the life of an urban patrician elite came to be almost as highly prized as that of a gentleman landowner or farmer. Moreover, different kinds of urban space became arenas for different kinds of social display and competition; the streets, the parks, the gardens, the assembly rooms and the churches. Towns had many practical attractions: the availability of goods, the relatively low cost of living and the convenience of travel and communications. Furthermore, the physical landscape of towns was rapidly improving and architectural standards were rising. Established traditions of vernacular building were discarded in favour of the neoclassical style. Eighteenth-century streets were cleaner and better lit than those of the previous century; parks, walks and boulevards offered a pleasant physical environment. Civic facilities were improving and cultural needs were met by the building of libraries and schools. This was a polite and fashionable society, one in which gentlemen and gentry, their wives and daughters, could feel at ease, one that catered to their social and leisure needs and that offered a range of cultivated services and refined pleasures. Here, the middling orders of the towns could mingle with members of the propertied elite of the countryside.

  The phenomenal number of new town houses gave employment to literally tens of thousands of craftsmen, many of whom used model-books derived from fashionable London designers. This ‘urban renaissance’21 consisted of parks and gardens, terraced houses, neatly laid out squares and side streets, with their shops with massive window frontages and ornate doorways. These were not only tasteful surroundings for the new middle classes. They also represented civic status and celebrated a
new civic identity, seen in the dozens of town halls, market halls, assembly rooms, bridges, museums and libraries. Such an identity flattered the social sensitivities of the respectable orders, evoked their local loyalties and integrated them into the social and political networks of the towns of Hanoverian Britain.

  Yet social distance was beginning to appear between the social elite and its inferiors. In some towns, notably but not exclusively cathedral cities like Gloucester, Hereford, Lincoln and Norwich, parishes in the central parts of town traditionally housed the wealthiest members of the patrician classes. In the decades after the Glorious Revolution new programmes of building were undertaken in many such towns. The adoption of new architectural styles for modern, expensive and socially select residential developments in these places erected huge social, and not infrequently legal, barriers against the mingling of the social orders. Other methods of spatial segregation may be seen in other types of town. Where living conditions in inner-city areas were at their most repulsive, as in the rising manufacturing towns, the wealthy began to retreat to outer suburbs, thus depriving the poorest parishes of much needed rating finance. This residential segregation was most marked in the large industrial towns, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield. Other forms of social separation may be observed in the 1730s, when the fashionable elite began to fence off their entertainments and leisure pursuits from contamination from classes lower down the social scale. One way of doing this was to raise the entrance fee for admission to such activities as cricket matches, which might otherwise be attended by the poor and the vulgar. Another was to restrict the provision of cultural pursuits. In the late 1730s a number of acts of Parliament created licensing systems to regulate the establishment of theatres, gaming-houses and horse racing. By then, popular participation in the leisure pursuits of the social elite was positively not encouraged. Where it could not be prevented it was, at least, kept at a distance by the provision of select and elegant grandstands in an attempt to defend the space of the social elite.

  As the century wore on, the distinctiveness of towns attracted more frequent comment. The terms ‘town’ and ‘village’ came to have more sharply contrasting meanings, both with their own stereotypical implications. An idyllic, bucolic idea of a timeless ‘village’ was celebrated in both art and the popular imagination, in contrast to the idea of a dynamic, commercial, bustling ‘town’. Even smaller towns were deemed to enjoy these cosmopolitan, urban qualities. Towns were deemed to have qualities and functions distinct from those of villages, but there was no reason to believe that in the future towns would come to be regarded as symbols and portents of a new kind of society. In the 1750s, at least, most of them remained extensions of the land.

  THE COMMON PEOPLE: ASSERTION, FESTIVITY AND DIRECT ACTION

  The culture of the landed classes and of the middling orders – polite, civilized and formal – coexisted with the culture of the masses – at first sight turbulent, disorderly and unruly. Indeed, popular displays of disrespect towards the middling and upper ranks of society could be so spectacular that they raise the issue of the popularity, or unpopularity, of the regime. At any time in history, the willingness of the mass of the people to accept the prevailing social system is difficult to calculate. It is not just a statistical problem. We are dealing with a vast variety of different trades and life styles. In eighteenth-century Britain the difficulty was complicated by problems of communication and by limitations of popular political awareness. When we remind ourselves that the great mass of the people could scarcely conceive of any viable alternative set of social arrangements and when we remember that hardly any of them have confided evidence about their opinions to historians, then in this area of the discipline more than any other the historian needs to exercise caution.

  In all this, two points need to be borne in mind. In the first place, people in the eighteenth century may have been poor and ill-educated but they were not automatically victims of oppression or creatures of impersonal forces. They could use their initiative and exhibit their own assertive patterns of behaviour. Indeed, the political behaviour of ordinary people was not simply the product of social pressure. In the second place, although popular political behaviour may have been very different from ‘high politics’, the two intersect in many crucial ways. They fed off each other and interconnected on many occasions. Indeed, the participation of the masses in the civic life of town and village could be triggered by a wide variety of causes. They might be drawn into the official calendar of national, royal or aristocratic anniversaries – and, what is often underplayed in these discussions, of religious celebrations – and take the opportunity of making their feelings known. This they would do by adopting a variety of strategies, such as making a noise (cheering, singing and jeering), by making music (vocal or instrumental), by the wearing of coloured clothes (clothes of all kinds, particularly hats and ribbons) and by reacting to – or even taking part in – processions and parades. In all this, perpetual references to local community affiliations – families, privileges, institutions, causes and vendettas – did much to register and thus to promote local pride and local consciousness.

  The weight of such evidence as we have of an active and living popular culture indicates that many people felt little reverence for the regime under which they lived their lives, and suggests that for many decades they were unable to identify with it. Their lack of enthusiasm for a German monarchy can readily be understood. Indeed, the extent of popular ridicule of the royal family in the first half of the eighteenth century should not be underestimated. It is difficult to measure the extent of anti-Hanoverian feeling because it shades into the vigorous dislike of the aristocracy sometimes displayed by the lower orders and, on occasions in the early years of the regime, this dislike can be confused with displays of genuine pro-Jacobite sentiment. The first few months of the reign witnessed hostile riots all over the country.22 Even after the suppression of the ‘15 George I and his entourage remained the object of popular dislike and derision. George II may have been a conscientious monarch and a courageous soldier but public opinion was not impressed. ‘In the gutter press he was treated with open contempt. His sexual habits were mocked, his personal foibles, especially his irascibility, derided.’23 His absorption in military affairs seemed to hint at dangerous absolutist tendencies at a time when people were genuinely afraid of standing armies. His command of a sizeable army of Hanoverian mercenaries pointed in the same direction. Nevertheless, his accession to the throne in 1727 was in marked contrast to that of his predecessor in 1714. In most localities, in fact, George II was greeted with bi-partisan and respectful, if unenthusiastic, loyalty. Nevertheless, until the extinction of the Jacobite threat Britain lived in some danger of invasion and popular attitudes towards the foreign dynasty remained at best provisional. Only when the threat was removed could a robust and substantial loyalty to the dynasty emerge.

  The upper classes, too, had to endure the disrespectful language and boisterous conduct with which the lower orders treated them. The arrogance and pomposity of their manners were greeted with dislike and resentment; their pretensions, their fashions and their behaviours were treated with satire, ridicule and mockery. There was not much that they could do about it. They had no adequate police force and they were thoroughly reluctant to mobilise a large army for policing purposes. They could only stomach popular displays of protest and resistance which were deeply embedded into popular culture and which went back for centuries. Indeed, these displays were normally prompted by official civic celebrations, sponsored by the largesse of local elites themselves. These parades, processions and meetings were great set-piece occasions. The pageantry and ceremony may have done something to discipline the lower classes and to remind them of their place in society but such social influences could work both ways as the upper groups in society could be made to feel the scorn and suspicion of their inferiors. Indeed, in many places, the routines of party politics had accustomed people to involve themselves in civic
affairs. Enhanced by the growing power and influence of the press, the forms of popular, local politics were, assertive and unruly, if humorous. It was common for these civic events to be used for the expression of a range of grievances, often of a social and economic character. Satirical attacks upon the governing classes were permitted through the popular tradition of social inversion, according to which the normal social order might be inverted as the great men of a community sought the good opinion of the lesser by, for example, serving their food and pouring their drink. The opportunities for personal insult and social humiliation were accepted with relish and with enthusiasm. A similar process might be seen by the behaviour of crowds at public hangings, where prevailing customs of counter-theatre manifested support for and solidarity with the unfortunate victim.