Coping with Change: British Society, 1780-1914

There are many parallels between Britain today and Britain during the 'long' nineteenth century. Both societies were coping with substantial and sustained population growth and the tensions this creates between different ethnic groups. Both had to cope with profound changes. Our current fixation with the environment was paralleled by the Victorians who sought, and largely failed, to take remedial action necessary to counter the impact of industrial change and urban growth on society....
More Description

There are many parallels between Britain today and Britain during the 'long' nineteenth century. Both societies were coping with substantial and sustained population growth and the tensions this creates between different ethnic groups. Both had to cope with profound changes. Our current fixation with the environment was paralleled by the Victorians who sought, and largely failed, to take remedial action necessary to counter the impact of industrial change and urban growth on society. Education, crime and the nature of leisure are equally issues on which the attitudes of Victorians have much in common with our anxieties today over educational standards, knife-crime and binge-drinking. We are still almost as psychotically fixated with our position in society as Victorian working men and women and those from the middle- and upper-classes. Victorian preoccupations with how to manage the problems created by economic and demographic change were largely unresolved by 1914. There may have been some improvements in people's quality of life but these were small and unevenly distributed. For most people, life remained a constant battle for survival to keep above the poverty line especially for the very young and the old. The 'arithmetic of woe' was all-pervasive. Only through hard work, self-help and a modicum of luck could most people maintain any semblance of quality in their lives. The fear of poverty and yet the recognition that poverty was inevitable at some stage in the individual's life was ever-present. Today, in an increasingly digitalised society, it is not difficult to find similar circumstances. Poverty has not been eliminated; in fact, if anything, in the last two decades it has worsened with growing concerns about a 'benefit culture', 'fuel poverty', the problems associated with an increasingly aging population and the economic crisis of 'credit-crunch Britain' and fear of austerity and recession. The poor it appears are getting poorer and the rich richer, a return to something like the 'two nations' of Disraeli's England. In many respects, the social and political agenda thrust on to the Victorians remains unresolved. Statements about a 'broken society' that periodically punctuate contemporary political debate would have been familiar to many Victorian social commentators. Coping with Change examines the changes that occurred in Britain during the nineteenth and early-twentieth century. The opening chapters provide the economic context for the book especially the character of economic change and continuity. This is followed by three chapters that consider agricultural and industrial, communication and demographic developments. The next tranche of chapters examine the social problems created by changes in towns, the public's health, housing, poverty, the nature of work, education and crime and leisure and the ways in which government sought to regulate these activities. Chapter 17 draws on these chapters and provides an overview of the nature of government in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century as it grappled with the practicalities of social reform. Religion is the subject of Chapters 18 and 19 while Chapters 20-23 consider the vexed nature of class in the nineteenth century. The book ends with a chapter on the end of the nineteenth century.