Outline of Module 7

1. The Culture of Victorian Cities.

Figure 1: The Symbol of an Age: Queen Victoria. The queen of Great Britain and the Empire from 1837 to 1901 symbolized some of the major characteristics of the age such as conscientiousness and strict morality.

Culture is used here in the large sense of the word as the collective values, beliefs, and behaviour of a society.[1] High culture is only one element on this bundle of characteristics. Several features of this age - roughly the second half of the 19th century - do stand out.

• It was an age of industrialism, with the harnessing of steam to shipping, railroads, and factories.

  Figure 2: Saint-Lazare Train Station, Paris, by Claude Monet,1877.
  Source: A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape (1984), p. 125.

• An entrepreneurial elite dominated both economic and community activity with the state at the national, provincial and local levels acting as little more than an arm of business.
• Industrialization created a new class of workers with less skill and power than that of the artisanal workers of a previous age.
• Among the prevailing ideas was a strong sense of religion and morality. Indeed, respectability in the community demanded adherence to one of the many religious denominations.
• To a great extent, one was what one had. And one's home was the ultimate status symbol.

• Cities grew to enormous sizes as industry moved from the country to the city; rural and foreign migrants followed.[3] The social implications of this industrialization have received some excellent analyses recently in Canada. Perhaps the most important work is Bettina Bradbury, Working Families: Age, Gender and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal (1993). Bradbury shows how the organization of industrial production and the nature of industrial work reshaped the social geography of Victorian Montreal. Over forty per cent of the city's industrial workforce was made up of women and children.

  Figure 2a: Bettina Bradbury Source: Gilbert Stelter, 1997.
  

• Workers responded by organizing unions. This is ably dealt with by Gregory Kealey, Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism, 1867 - 1892 (1980) and by Bryan Palmer, Culture in Conflict: Skilled Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Hamilton, Ontario, 1860-1914 (1979). See also Kealey and Palmer's Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880-1900 (1982), especially chapter one which has an excellent overview of industrial development in Ontario cities and towns.
• A core-periphery urban form evolved which emphasized social divisions. Socially and spatially, people were segregated by class and ethnicity. Where you lived and where you worked were also separated.[4]
• A new urban culture appeared in the biggest cities and eventually filtered down to smaller places as well. According to Gunther Barth, the new urban culture's key instruments were the apartment building, the metropolitan press, the department store, the ball park, and the vaudeville house. Unlike other social institutions like the church and school, they came into existence with the modern (19th century) city.[5]
• Victorian morality affected every aspect of urban life. As in Britain's largest cities, big American cities such as New York experienced a rise in what many believed was a rise in selfish materialism and corruption. Some of these attempts to restore a sense of community are detailed in Eric Homberger, Scenes From the Life of a City: Corruption and Conscience in Old New York (1994). The extent to which the large city itself became equated with social disorder and seemed to threaten established cultural norms is the subject of Carl Smith's Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief (1994). Smith argues that three major Chicago events - the great fire of 1871, the Haymarket riot, and the Pullman strike - created a strong link between the ideas of city and disorder in the minds of Americans. Smith has also set up a very useful website which illustrates the process of creating historical consciousness: The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory.This site emphasizes the process whereby an event becomes part of a city's culture through printed eyewitness accounts, the contemporary press, popular images, and "instant" histories. Smith uses fiction, poetry, drama, songs, and art which was inspired by Chicago's destruction.

2. The Culture of Victorian Guelph

Some of these leaders and their businesses are pictured below.

William Bell and the Bell Organ and Piano Factory. Source: Guelph Public Library.

Charles Raymond and the Raymond Sewing Machine Company building on Yarmouth Street. Source: Historical Atlas of Wellington County (1906).

Part of the George Sleeman family in their conservatory and the Sleeman house and brewery on Waterloo Avenue. Source: Guelph Public Library.

J.W. Lyon and the title page of one of the books he published under the name - The World Publishing Company. Source: Historical Atlas of Wellington County (1906).

Guelph's social character during this era is clearly definable - it was a British Protestant town.

Table One shows how Guelph changed from a town of British immigrants to a city of Canadians, but the British orientation for the rest of the century becomes more clear in Table Two.

Guelph's population was overwhelmingly of British origin. Major ethnic group distinctions can be found within the larger British group. Those of English background dominated throughout, followed by the Irish and the Scots. Each of these groups maintained a strong sense of old-country identity through their ethnic associations - the St. George's, St. Patrick's, and St. Andrew's societies.

Religion was a key element of Victorian life in Guelph. In general, as Table Three shows, Guelph was heavily Protestant, with the Anglicans eventually supplanted by the Presbyterians and Methodists as the leading denominations. The strong connections between ethnicity, religion, and class have been explored by Mary Rae Shantz who studied the Irish Catholics at mid-century.[7]

Tables Two and Three point to the existence of a considerable Black community in Guelph by 1871. The religious statistics for the Methodist Episcopal church show 61 affiliated, but Table Two has only 23 of "African" origin. By 1881, when a fine stone church was built on Essex Street, the census listed 107 "Negroes".

Religion, ethnicity, class, and gender were the key variables in Debra Nash-Chamber's major analysis of the impact of industrialization on Guelph's society in the years 1861 to 1881. She found that the social results of industrialization in Guelph were not as harsh as they had been in some larger Canadian cities like Hamilton. Although the economic differences between rich and poor widened, Guelph did not develop a significant unskilled occupational sector.[8]

Denominational histories of most Guelph churches are available, but only a few are of any scholarly quality.[9]

3. Suggested Research Topics

• The changing industrial work force in Guelph. Comparisons to the occupational structure of other regional places.
• Religious denominations. Ethnic and class aspects of Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Roman Catholic groups.
• Ethnic mix and community character. Differences between cities of the region, and between town and country.
• Black society in Guelph.
• The new urban culture
  • baseball
  • opera and vaudeville
  • the department store

4. Assigned Reading

5. Discussion Questions