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Town histories and Victorian plaudits: some examples from Preston

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

A. J. Vickery
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Extract

Charles Dickens visited Preston in January 1854 to report on the cotton lock-out of that year. What he saw contributed to his vision of the archetypal northern, urban industrial centre, Coketown:

It was a town of red brick or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever and never got uncoiled.

Three years later a rather different topographical account appeared in Charles Hardwick's history of the borough:

Notwithstanding the occasional carpings of a few splenetic travellers, Preston is generally and deservedly recognized as one of the cleanest and most pleasantly situated manufacturing towns in England. The cotton factories are chiefly erected to the north and east of the old aristocratic borough …. and do not as yet materially interfere with the more ‘fashionable’ or picturesque sections of the district.

The contrast illuminates the shortcomings of the town history both as literature and historical geography; but indicates the tenor of Prestonian self-justification. It is precisely this prosaic subjectivity which makes the histories a rich source. As Peter Clark asserts, ‘even fifth-rate urban historians sometimes have an important story to tell.’

Unlike many other towns with long-established traditions of urban chronicling, history writing in Preston did not blossom until the nineteenth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 15 , May 1988 , pp. 58 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

Notes

This paper is drawn from work in progress for a London Ph.D. thesis and was given as a paper to the History Workshop Conference ‘Literature and History, II’ at Lancashire Polytechnic, Preston, in October 1986. I am grateful for comments and advice from the workshop participants and in particular from Michael Collinge and my thesis supervisor P. J. Corfield.

1 Dickens, C., Hard Times (1854; reprint, 1969), 65.Google Scholar

2 Hardwick, C., History of the Borough of Preston (1857), 426–7.Google Scholar

3 Clark, P., ‘Visions of the urban community: antiquarians and the English city before 1800’, in Fraser, D. and Sutcliffe, A. (eds), The Pursuit of Urban History (1983), 105–24.Google Scholar

4 It would have been useful to compare eighteenth- and nineteenth-century interpretations of local history. It is hard to disentangle the urban and commercial ethos, and a dearth of surviving records might lead one to suppose that the two are interchangeable. Certainly, these histories were written long after Preston's heyday as a gentry resort. The authors were printers, journalists, booksellers, and self-styled literary figures: Whittle, P., A Topographical, Statistical and Historical Account of the Borough of Preston (1821);Google Scholar Jefferey, E., The History of Preston in Lancashire (1822);Google Scholar Whittle, P., History of the Borough of Preston in the County Palatinate of Lancaster (1837);Google Scholar Dobson, W., Preston in the Olden Time; Or, Illustrations of the Manners and Customs in Preston in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century (1857);Google Scholar Hewitson, A., History of Preston (1883).Google Scholar

5 Morgan, H. N. B. in his unpublished thesis, ‘Social and political leadership in Preston 1820–1860’ (M. Litt. University of Lancaster, 1980)Google Scholar stresses the extent to which the town's prominent businessmen were active in local government.

6 Clark, P., in Fraser, and Sutcliffe, , Pursuit of Urban History, 117.Google Scholar

7 There are no reliable data between 1760 and 1801. Nineteenth-century population figures can be found in the records of the Local Board of Health Office, Lancashire Record Office, Preston. There is no major, modern history of Preston. For an economic survey, see Morgan, , ‘Social and political leadership’Google Scholar, and for the context of national, industrial development, see Edwards, M. M., The Growth of the British Cotton Trade, 1780–1815 (1967).Google Scholar

8 Anon., Handbook and Guide (1840)Google Scholar, Lancashire Record Office.

9 This is not to argue that the middle classes themselves were monolithic, though this evidence in interesting in the light of recent discussion of the ideological, social and political cohesiveness of the Victorian middle class. For an introduction to the fast-developing debate, see Trainor, R., ‘Urban elites in Victorian Britain’, Urban History Yearbook (1985), 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Jeffrey, , History of Preston, 11.Google Scholar

11 Dobson, W. and Harland, J., A History of the Preston Guild (1862), 67.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., 68.

13 Baines, E., History of Lancashire (1870), II, 472.Google Scholar

14 Edgecombe, R. (ed.), The Diary of Frances, Lady Shelley 1787–181 7 (1912)Google Scholar, 3.1 am grateful to Michael Collinge for this reference.

15 Notably the Derby family withdrew their patronage.

16 Anon., Handbook and Guide.Google Scholar

17 Dobson, , Preston in Olden Time, 4.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 4.

19 Baines, , History of Lancashire, 472.Google Scholar

20 Dobson, , Preston in Olden Time, 31.Google Scholar

21 Hardwick, , Borough of Preston, 377.Google Scholar

22 Dobson, , Preston in Olden Time, 31.Google Scholar

23 For this and the next quotation, see respectively Whittle, , Topographical… Account, 38;Google Scholar and History of Preston, iv.Google Scholar

24 Preston Chronicle, 28 February 1824 (British Library Colindale).Google Scholar From the letters to the editors of Preston's newspapers something of a local debate can be reconstructed, expressing the dichotomy between humane ethics and commercial rationalism.

25 Whittle, , History of Preston, Frontispiece and Address, iv, v.Google Scholar

26 Hewitson, , History of Preston, 167.Google Scholar

27 The body of their interpretation bears out Perkin, Harold's assertions on the nature of the ‘entrepreneurial ideal’ in Perkin, H., The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (1969).Google Scholar In particular, his sketch of the active owner-manager of the industrial revolution as popular hero in ibid., 222: The entrepreneur was the impresario, the creative force, the initiator of the economic cycle. He it was who conceived the end, found the means and bore the burden of the risk and paid out the other factors of production.'

28 Smiles, S., Self Help, (1859)Google Scholar, as cited in Perkin, ibid., 225.

29 Young, G. M., Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (1935), 5.Google Scholar

30 Hardwick, , Borough of Preston, 377.Google Scholar

31 Lancashire Record Office, Cavendish of Holker Letters.

32 Commercial rationalism and utilitarianism were often linked in Victorian rhetoric. For example, Wade, J., History of the Middle and Working Classes (1833), 183Google Scholar: ‘The utility of a class of capitalists has been demonstrated by showing the advantages derived in society from the avocations of the middle ranks, consisting of bankers, merchants, importers, wholesale dealers and retailers.’ However, at the heart of this combination lay the tension between laissez-faire capitalism and Benthamite intervention.

33 Young, , Victorian England, 5.Google Scholar

34 Hardwick, , Borough of Preston, 378–81.Google Scholar

35 Ibid., 380.

36 For example, Fortunes Made in Business; A Series of Original Sketches … by Various Writers (1884), 10: ‘As to the place the conditions … might be regarded as the very reverse of favourable, for Preston had borne through many centuries the reputation of being proud; and pride and trade were in those days somewhat conflicting terms.’ Also ibid., 20: ‘The various works planned and carried on by the energy of John Horrocks gave an immense impulse to the trade of the town. Shops, houses and places of business were erected on all sides and other mills rose in different quarters and the population which had stood so long at 6, 000 increased with startling rapidity and the aristocratic, historical, borough cast off its old-time aspect and awoke in full activity.’

37 Discussion of this theme forms part of my research in progress, examining the ideas and inter-relationships of commercial, professional and landed elites in Lancashire society 1760–1820.

38 Clark, P. in Fraser, and Sutcliffe, , Pursuit of Urban History, 123.Google Scholar

39 It is probably impossible to know how cynically this historical hyperbole was devised and read, whether for instance it enjoyed the status of modern advertising.

40 As argued by Wiener, M. J. in English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1950 (1981).Google Scholar

41 Cited in Harvie, C., Martin, G., and Scharf, A., Industrialization and Culture, 1830–1914 (1970), 52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar