Introduction

This chapter mainly covers the long Victorian era in the UK, which started with the enthronement of Queen Victoria in 1837 and lasted until her death in 1901. In total, she reigned for more than 63 years. The focus will be on mid- and late Victorian England. This period was preceded by the early Victorian age partly dealt with in the previous chapter. Perhaps the most conspicuous heritage from the early Victorian age was utilitarianism and its most important expression the Benthamite panopticon and Bentham's proposal for a National Charity Company that had to solve the national pauper problem.

By the end of the early Victorian age, about 1845, Manchester, in particular, had become the most important English ‘model’ factory town. Hundreds of factory chimneys dominated the black-coated city and its skyline. 1845 was also the year in which Friedrich Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England. In this book, Engels denounced the extremely bad living and working conditions of Manchester and the English working class in cities like London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Birmingham, and Liverpool. In his eyes, workers were reduced to simple ‘factory-hands’ belonging to a proletariat.

As a centre of the English cotton and wool industry, by the mid-nineteenth century, Manchester had become the so-called Cottonpolis, also immortalized in Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times as ‘Coketown’. Manchester was an important modern English vanguard city of that time and can be considered as Bentham's Utopia materialized. The utilitarian cash nexus was predominant. Time was money. Everything was measured. Employers showed minimal care for their workers and also the civic architecture of the town was strictly utilitarian.

After a brief section on the Industrial Revolution in England (3.2), I will pay further attention in this chapter to Manchester as a Benthamite factory town and its development towards a more civic Victorian city (3.3). ‘Cottonpolis’ also provoked a romantic counter reaction in the form of labour-utopias directed at changing the nature and circumstances of factory towns in several distinct ways. Most important in this respect is William Morris's mediaevalist-oriented utopia, as described in his well-known novel ‘News from Nowhere’.