ABSTRACT
Introduction While geographers have continued to chart the transition ‘from Sjoberg to Burgess’, plotting the distributions of the extremes of social stratification, or measuring the segregation of different occupational classes by way of dissimilarity indices and location quotients, social historians have paid more attention to the dynamics of class structure among the ‘middling’ and respectable who accounted for the majority of urban residents in nineteenth-century society. All too often, the two groups of researchers have passed in the night, barely aware of each other’s existence.1
