ABSTRACT
The first half of the nineteenth century was an ‘age of societies’, particularly in the new urban towns, which possessed the necessary critical mass of people from which associations could draw their members and had low levels of trust. In 1861, the Bolton Chronicle, the local newspaper of the Lancashire town of Bolton, remarked that there ‘there are now more public meetings held and there is more public business transacted in a week than in a month when this [newspaper] was first published [in 1823]’. The rate of growth is difficult to determine. Most formal networks were ephemeral and left little trace of their existence. Some guide as to numbers, though, can be gained from references to networks in the local press. In Bolton, the various local newspapers mention 277 separate societies during 1823-49 and 417 during 1850-70. The proliferation of associations, to some extent, was an extension of the eighteenth-century expansion of informal networks. Able to fulfil the rising trust needs of the emergent industrial economy, however, these failed to meet the far greater requirements of full industrialisation. They were thus gradually superseded by formal societies, which produced more trust more efficiently by ensuring regular interaction and comprising larger and more diverse memberships.1
