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The Role of Religion in the Cultural Structure of the Later Victorian City

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

J. H. S. Kent
J. H. S. Kent
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
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Extract

One obviously cannot make generalizations covering all the towns and cities of late nineteenth-century England. London was a case by itself; Liverpool a very different port from Bristol; an industrial town like Rochdale seems very remote from Dorchester. Nor is it possible to give a single brief definition of a city, though many have tried. ‘Just as there is no single form of the pre-industrial city,’ wrote R. E. Pahl, ‘urbanization as concentration of population does not lead to any single pattern of class action and conflict.’ Attempts to provide a definition of a city culminate in David Riesman's comment that the city is what we choose to make it for the purposes of analysis. One has to accept that Bristol, Dorchester, Rochdale and Liverpool were towns without exaggerating what they had in common.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 23 , January 1973 , pp. 153 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1973

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References

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