Life in the Emerging Urban Society in the Nineteenth Century

1. Life in the Emerging Urban Society in the Nineteenth Century Chapter 24

2. Industry and the Growth of Cities • Since the Middle Ages, European cities had been centers of government, culture, and large-scale commerce. • Cities were also crowded, dirty, and unhealthy. • The challenge of urban growth was felt first and most acutely in Britain. • In the 1820s and 1830s, people in France and Britain began to worry about the condition of their cities. • Rapid urbanization without any public transportation worsened already poor living conditions in cities in the nineteenth century. • Government was slow to improve sanitation and building codes. • Ignorance and the legacy of rural housing conditions played a key role in shaping urban living conditions.

3. Public Health and the Bacterial Revolution. • Advances in public health, urban planning, and urban transport ameliorated these conditions by 1900. • Edwin Chadwick in England advocated improved sewage systems. • The miasmatic theory of disease held that people contract disease through exposure to the bad odors of decay and putrification. • Louis Pasteur in France discovered that bacteria caused disease (1860s). • Building on the germ theory of disease, Joseph Lister developed new methods for fighting infections among surgical patients.

4. Urban Planning and Public Transportation • In Paris and other European cities, urban planners demolished buildings and medieval walls to create wide boulevards and public parks. • Baron Haussmann (1809–1884) played a lead role in the reshaping of Paris. • Mass public transport, including electric streetcars, enabled city dwellers to live further from the city center, relieving overcrowding.

5. Rich and Poor and Those in Between Social Structure • Real wages rose sharply over the course of the nineteenth century. • Wealth was distributed very unevenly throughout Europe. • Only 20 percent of the population was middle class or wealthy. • The gap between rich and poor endured, in part, because industrial and urban development made society more diverse and less unified. The Middle Classes • The urban middle class was diverse. • The upper middle class included the most successful industrialists, bankers, and merchants. Increasingly, it merged with the aristocracy. • Middle ranks included doctors, lawyers, and moderately successful bankers and industrialists. • The lower middle class included small business owners, salespeople, store managers, clerks, and other white-collar employees.

6. The Working Classes • Skilled workers lived very different lives from the semiskilled and unskilled. • The top 15 percent of the working class became a labor aristocracy. • Skilled workers’ income approached that of the lower middle classes. • Skilled workers tended to embrace the middle-class moral code. • Semiskilled and unskilled workers included many different occupations, from carpenters and bricklayers to longshoremen, street vendors, and domestic servants. • Domestic servants were one of the largest components of the unskilled labor force. • Domestic service served as a transition to urban life for many rural women. Working-Class Leisure and Religion • Working-class leisure included drinking in taverns; watching sports, especially racing and soccer; and attending music hall performances. • Working-class church attendance declined in the nineteenth century.