Industrialization and the Social and Economic Structure of Europe 425towns and cities. Older towns often still stood within
their medieval defensive walls. The urban and the rural
were intertwined in such towns, sometimes with farm-
land within the walls and usually with important farm-
ing surrounding the town. Urban families often still had
gardens or even orchards. Livestock lived inside the
towns, and it was not unusual to see a pig wandering
the streets. A 1786 census of Hanover—an important
German capital and the home of the English royal
family—found 365 head of cattle living within the
town walls, but no sidewalks, paved streets, or sewer
system. This remained true of the new industrial towns:
Transplanted animals lived alongside uprooted workers
in the shadow of the factory.
The modern city emerged painfully during the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. London began the
habit of numbering street addresses and invented side-
walks in the 1760s. Watt developed steam heating for
his office, and his steam pipes were the first central
heating. Experiments with the newly plentiful supply of
coal led William Murdock to the invention of indoor
lighting—the burning of coal gas to provide better illu-
mination than candles did. By 1807 the city of London
was installing Murdock’s gaslights on the streets; by
1820 gaslights were common in the homes of the well-
to-do. The 1820s also saw London and Paris invent
new public transportation systems: the horse-drawn
omnibus, soon supplemented by urban railroads. The
French Revolution led to a big change in city life—the
invention of the restaurant, a result of the emigration of
aristocrats who left behind many unemployed chefs. In
1789 Paris had only one restaurant (as distinct from
inns or cafes); in 1804 there were more than five hun-
dred and the institution was spreading. By the middle
of the nineteenth century, the manufacturing economy
had created vast department stores (such as the Bon
Marché in Paris) and even arcade-shopping centers
(such as the Galleria in Milan).
Urban life during industrialization was not entirely
rosy. The industrial and manufacturing towns such as
Manchester, Essen, and L⁄odz initially grew too fast for
amenities to keep pace with the population (see docu-
ment 22.1). Housing, fresh water, sewers, and sanita-
tion were dangerously inadequate. An attractive
environment (such as trees or clean air) or convenient
services (such as shops or schools) were rarer. Many
contemporaries recorded their horror at the sight of
factory towns. Charles Dickens depicted Manchester as
a dreadful place blackened by the soot of ubiquitous
coal burning. Elisabeth Gaskell, who rivaled Dickens
for vivid details, described the nightmare of life in such
conditions. In Mary Barton(1848), she depicted the
squalid conditions of life in a slum cellar, where starva-
tion and typhus competed for the lives of a family
sleeping on beds of damp straw.
Even the old cities could not keep up with their
growth. In the Westminster district of London, resi-
dents living within one block of Parliament complained
to the government in 1799 about the stinking odor of
their street, which had not been cleaned of horse and
human waste in six months. In that same district of the
richest city on Earth, air pollution was so terrible during
hot weather that Parliament usually voted for an early
summer recess. But those who went north for theDOCUMENT 22.1
Charles Dickens Describes
Conditions in Manchester
Observers were often startled by living conditions in the early
industrial revolution, and many of them wrote vivid descrip-
tions of what they had seen. The most famous include an unat-
tractive portrait of Manchester in Charles Dickens’s novel
Hard Times(1854)
Coketown [Manchester]... 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 ma-
chinery and tall chimneys, out of which inter-
minable serpents of smoke trailed themselves
forever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a
black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-
smelling dye, and vast piles of buildings full of win-
dows where there was a rattling and a trembling all
day long, and where the piston of the steam engine
worked monotonously up and down like the head
of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It
contained several large streets all very like one an-
other, and many small streets still more like one an-
other, inhabited by people equally like one another,
who all went in and out at the same hours, with the
same sound upon the same pavements, to do the
same work, and to whom every day was the same
as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the
counterpart of the last and the next.
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times.New York: T. L. McElrath, 1854;
and Tocqueville, Alexis de. Journeys to England and Ireland.
1835.