ABSTRACT

For the Victorians the physical outline of town and village was so fluid that they read the urban environment with a mixture of fear, alienation, and applause. They all point to a Victorian obsession with spatial specialization and spatial segregation according to function, social class, economy, and so-called 'Victorian morality', and they all affected daily life in such fundamental ways that one could regard them as a sort of ongoing reinvention of urban life. The contemplation of all of this by twentieth-century historians is equally ambiguous. From the perspective of the British town the Victorian era. One very influential inquiry into the British market place was Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the English Working Class of 1844. He argued that the public market place in the new industrial town was filthy and disease-ridden and worked so much against the interests of the working class that working people received nothing but leftover food largely unfit for human consumption.