ABSTRACT

As the focus of human geography has shifted from pattern to process, and from landscape to society, so in the field of urban historical geography, the last twenty years have witnessed a blossoming of interest in the structure and organisation of urban industrial societies. This interest originated partly in the quantitative revolution, which stimulated the analysis of large data sets and a search for sources, such as the nineteenth-century census enumerators' books, amenable to statistical analysis, and partly in the rise of contemporary urban social geography, in which ecological models and social area theory were tested through multivariate analysis of small-area statistics in modern censuses (Robson, 1969; Timms, 1971; Herbert and Johnston, 1976).