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Life in the Emerging Urban Society

1840–1914

When Londoners gathered in 1860 at the Grand Fete in the Crystal Palace (see painting below), they enjoyed the pleasures of an established urban society that would have been unthinkable just sixty years earlier. Across the nineteenth century, as industrialization expanded exponentially, Europeans left their farms and country villages to find work in the ever-growing towns and cities. By 1900, in much of developed western Europe, more than half the population lived in urban conglomerations, a trend of rural-to-urban migration that would spread and continue across the twentieth century.

Despite the happy faces in the London crowd pictured here, the emerging urban society brought costs as well as benefits. On the whole, living standards rose in the nineteenth century, but wages and living conditions varied greatly, and many city dwellers were still poor. Advances in public health and urban planning brought some relief to the squalid working-class slums, yet vast differences in income, education, and occupation still divided people into socially stratified groups. As a result, rather than discuss “the working class” or “the middle class,” it is more accurate to speak of “working classes” and “middle classes” and consider the blurred boundaries between the two. Major changes in family life and gender roles accompanied this diversified class system. Dramatic breakthroughs in chemistry, medicine, and electrical engineering further transformed urban society after 1880, and a new generation of artists, writers, and professional social scientists struggled to explain and portray the vast changes wrought by urbanization.

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