ABSTRACT
In 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, Queen Victoria visited Manchester. Manchester had good reason for thinking it should have the status, but coming as this did at the beginning of two decades or so which saw civic rivalry blossom on a scale never previously witnessed in England, the events of 1851–3 – when a grant of city status was finally made – came to symbolize the growth of civic pride more generally. The question of city status was hardly an issue between the 1540s and the 1830s. Eventually, city status would become part of this quest for civic recognition, but little could be done in the middle decades of the nineteenth century because no new dioceses were formed. The achievement of city status, which had motivated Manchester's corporation in the 1850s, finally came by the 1890s to be seen as a necessary accessory for the great provincial towns of industrial Britain.
