ABSTRACT
Rising standards of literacy and education and the gentrification of towns played their part in the rise of urban historiography. The writing of urban history, like other branches of the subject at this time, was increasingly bound up with the expansion of the professions. Urban change in the eighteenth century was not restricted to the physical extension of towns and their more emphatic economic profile. Shops, rather than markets, became increasingly characteristic and extended in range; confectioners, grocers, booksellers, tobacconists, newsagents, and hairdressers all became regular features of the eighteenth-century urban scene. Books in the late eighteenth century could reach publication through different routes. Some urban histories were published in parts, both to spread the costs and also to use successive instalments of the books themselves as advertising material. Criticism notwithstanding, Rev. John Milner’s history became a considerable success, as its various editions and long shelf life clearly demonstrate.
