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Page 5 of 8

• 1. Britain's world dominance
• 2. Understanding 'laissez-faire'
• 3. Intervention
• 4. Locating the problems
• 5. Urban and rural squalor
• 6. The growth of the state
• 7. Education and health policies
• 8. Centralisation, or not?
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Urban and rural squalor

So, was Manchester better seen as the triumphant productive capital of the world's first industrial nation or as the 'shock city of the industrial age'? Should the Victorians celebrate their world-beating industrial triumphs or quake at a modern civilisation threatened by numberless hordes of the dirty, the disease-ridden and the ill-educated - all potential recruits to a vast criminal underclass?

Evidence steadily accumulated which confirmed Kay's early analysis. Severe social problems afflicted all the large cities of the United Kingdom. By the mid-Victorian period, it was also clear that these problems were not confined to urban areas.

Poverty and hopelessness abounded in rural areas, where the supply of agricultural labour became much greater than the demand for it, as efficiency and profit began to dominate the rural economy. The Victorians, great fact-grubbers that they were, started to accumulate evidence about what was happening - seeking information about those aspects of the health and morality of the nation that rang the most urgent alarm bells.

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Published: 2004-11-04