Anne B. Rodrick - Self-Help and Civic Culture

ANNE B. RODRICK

First published 2004 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2019 by Routledge

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Copyright 2004, Anne B. Rodrick

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ISBN 13: 978-0-8153-9696-3 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-351-14948-8 (ebk)

Density and proximity are two of the defining characteristics of the urban dimension. It is these that identify a place as uniquely urban, though the threshold for such pressure points varies from place to place. What is considered an important cluster in one context may not be considered so elsewhere. A third defining characteristic is functionality the commercial or strategic position of a town or city which conveys an advantage over other places. Over time, these functional advantages may diminish, or the balance of advantage may change within a hierarchy of towns. To understand how the relative importance of towns shifts over time and space is to grasp a set of relationships which is fundamental to the study of urban history.

Towns and cities are products of history, yet have themselves helped to shape history. As the proportion of urban dwellers has increased, so the urban dimension has proved a legitimate unit of analysis through which to understand the spectrum of human experience and to explore the cumulative memory of past generations. Though obscured by layers of economic, social and political change, the study of the urban milieu provides insights into the functioning of human relationships and, if urban historians themselves are not directly concerned with current policy studies, few contemporary concerns can be understood without reference to the historical development of towns and cities.

This longer historical perspective is essential to an understanding of social processes. Crime, housing conditions and property values, health and education, discrimination and deviance, and the formulation of regulations and social policies to deal with them were, and remain, amongst the perennial preoccupations within towns and cities. No historical period has a monopoly of these concerns. They recur in successive generations, albeit in varying mixtures and strengths; the details may differ.

The central forces of class, power and authority in the city remain the organisers. If this was the case for different periods, so it was for different geographical entities and cultures. Both scientific knowledge and technical information were available across Europe and showed little respect for frontiers. Yet despite common concerns and access to broadly similar knowledge, different solutions to urban problems were proposed and adopted by towns and cities in different parts of Europe. This comparative dimension informs urban historians as to which were systematic factors and which were of a purely local nature: general and particular forces can be distinguished.

These analytical frameworks, considered in a comparative context, inform the books in this series.

Universit de Tours Jean-Luc Pinol

University of Leicester Richard Rodger

This project emerged from a series of informal and wide-ranging discussions with Standish Meacham and Simon Cordery on class, respectability and the mounting challenges to the historiography of Victorian England in the early 1990s. At the time, I was immersed in another research project on the content and uses of ephemera in selected mid-Victorian newspapers. As part of that project I read Michael Wolffs wonderful article, The British Controversialist and Impartial Inquirer, 18501872: A Pearl From the Golden Stream. Wolff sketched out the history and contents of one national newspaper devoted to young men seeking to improve themselves intellectually and culturally. These men viewed themselves and their efforts as an important part of a broader national trajectory of improvement defined not by occupation or class but by a belief in the possibilities of cultural perfection and the importance of aspiration rather than material achievement as a vehicle for self-definition. Wolffs article suggested one alternative to the class-based approach to nineteenth-century England that was coming under increasing attack by post-modernist historians.