Impact of the Industrial Revolution 551Social segregation intensified within cities. Industrial pollution, including
smoke and other smells, altered residential patterns, driving some middle
class families to new quarters. At the same time, some people of means in
industrial cities moved to newly developing middle-class suburbs. Country
side secondary residences, retreats from the bustle of urban life, became
more common. Although most European suburbs were plebeian, in England
some middle-class people of means moved to exclusive suburbs, such as the
villa neighborhoods on the edge of London and Manchester. A poem in 1851
described a suburb of Birmingham, England: “See Edgbaston, the bed of
prosperous trade, Where they recline who have their fortunes made; Strong
in their wealth, no matter how possessed, There fashion calls, and there at
ease they rest.” The wealthy in London enjoyed vast public gardens, com
fortable theaters, and elegant shopping arcades, a jolting contrast to the mis
ery of the East End. Public gardens like Copenhagen’s Tivoli and Berlin’s
Tiergarten, as well as Paris’s Champs-Elysees, developed so middle-class
denizens could observe and be seen. Cafes catered to people of means—
coffee was expensive—while cabarets, selling cheap drink, attracted more
ordinary people.
On the Move
As more people died than were born in most large cities, immigration of
peasants and unskilled workers accounted in almost every case for urban
growth. Thus, only about half of the residents of London and Paris and
only about a quarter of those in the even more rapidly growing northern
English industrial towns had been born there. The majority of immigrants
were poor, r
Most migrants moved to town because they knew someone there, usually
relatives or friends from home who might be able to help them find a job,
and perhaps put them up until they found a job and their own place to live.
People tended to live in the same neighborhood as others from their regions,
such as the sooty “Little Ireland” in the midst of the largest factories of
Manchester in which many of the 35,000 Irish of the city lived in cellars, or
the infamous Irish “rookery” of St. Giles in central London. The discrimina
tion faced by the Irish in London was reflected in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North
and South (1855), in which the villains are Irish. Among the English of all
social classes, “Paddy” became a racist stereotype of the Irish character,
depicted as ignorant, superstitious, lazy, drunken, and potentially violent.
Anti-Irish feeling in Victorian England was linked to anti-Catholicism,
which, after generating violence and riots in the 1850s and 1860s, only
slowly declined in the last part of the century.
Between 1816 and 1850, at least 5 million Europeans booked passage
across the seas, particularly during the “hungry forties,” which struck Cen
tral and Eastern Europe and Ireland particularly hard. One and a half mil
lion people of Ireland’s population of approximately 8 million left their