Nostalgia Examiner: City life in the 19th-century
Nostalgia Examiner: City life in the 19th-century
Some 150 years ago, the world was just getting ready to become louder, industrialized, and electric. City life in the 19th-century was much different than we know it today. However, some of the city amenities we see in our cities today date back from those times.
European society of the 19th-century was largely forged by two processes that interweaved with one another—industrialization and urbanization. There was a significant increase in industrial production. Mining prospered with new machines. Chemicals developed. Electricity was invented. Commercial goods arrived faster than ever before as transportation got improved. Simultaneously, there was a visible population influx to cities. People from the countryside were moving to the new and growing urban environments in search of jobs.
The Industrial Revolution enabled the transformation of the Old Continent as much as it did so across the pond. Urbanized cities rapidly grew in numbers. For the first time, the majority accommodated to an urban rather than rural lifestyle. Nevertheless, city life in the 19th-century did not offer the best living conditions, so to speak.
French author Henri Lecouturier describes Paris in 1848 in one of his books. His description offers a glimpse at the grim reality of the French capital as one example. He writes: “If you contemplate from the summit of the Montmartre or any other hill in the neighborhood, the congestion of houses piled up at every point of a vast horizon, what do you observe? Above, a sky that is always overcast, even on the finest day. Clouds of smoke, like a vast floating curtain, hide it from view. A forest of chimneys with black or yellowish chimneypots renders the sight singularly monotonous… Looking at it one is tempted to wonder whether this is Paris.”
“Most of the streets in this wonderful Paris are nothing but filthy alleys forever damp from a reeking flood. Hemmed in between two rows of tall houses, they never get the sun; it reaches only the tops of the chimneys dominating them. To catch a glimpse of the sky you have to look straight up above your head. A haggard and sickly crowd perpetually throngs these streets, their feet in the gutter, their noses in infection, their eyes outraged by the most repulsive garbage at every street corner,” observes Lecouturier. The writer would have been in his late twenties upon juggling down his observations.
One research suggests that survival in 19th-century cities actually depended on the size of the city: the larger the city, the smaller your chances. The research though referring to the U.S. seems to be applicable elsewhere, especially continental Europe.
The Role of Urban Migration: Population Boom
Industrialization promoted urbanization, defining the style of city life in the 19th-century. More factories meant more job opportunities, so populations from the countryside flocked to the big city, amassing a source of cheap labor.
While this process was accelerated in Britain, where more than half of the adult male population was attracted to industrialization-related jobs, continental Europe still kept some kind of balance between factory production and agrarian jobs.
As industrialization pulled out entire populations from the countryside and inside the urban areas, faster natural birth rates were generated quickly. So, markedly, the 19th-century was a time of significant population boom.
Notably, London saw a population spike from less than two million in 1840 to over four million by 1890. This figure almost double-folded by the time of World War One.
In continental Europe, Berlin, the capital of the new German Empire, counted less than 500,000 inhabitants around the year 1866; by 1914 it had two million. London and Berlin were two of 14 European cities in total that had a population of over one million people by the start of World War One.
Russia lagged behind with industrialization, however by 1903 it had over 15 cities that accommodated more than 100,000 tenants, a five-fold increase from 1863 when only three Russian cities had that many peoples.
Overseas, in the U.S., the flux of people from rural America to big 19th-century cities was also steady, again supplying cheap labor for factories. Some figures suggest that “between 1880 and 1890, almost 40% of townships in the U.S. lost population because of migration.”
Class Divisions Were Obvious
From the most affluent in society to the poorest—city life in the 19th-century transformed the living and working for all and any social group.
A new elite was being formed—new money if you will—of businessmen and entrepreneurs who sought after opportunities and opened factories, of merchants and bankers who also gained from a new world of trade and economics. The uprising elite was nothing short from the already established aristocrats.
There was a middle class, composed of administrators and managers of the new professions and industries. However, if there was a class that truly contrasted the livelihood of the upper class, it was the lowest strata of society. Impoverished workers and resigned farmers, all deflecting village life to work in factories, offices, or the homes of middle and upper-class families, as miners, road builders, or domestic servants, to name three working-class professions.
To illustrate the discrepancy between rich and poor in the 19th-century, it’s worth mentioning that “the poorest forty percent of people in industrialized countries received just sixteen percent of total national income which emphasizes the gulf that existed between the rich and poor in the cities.”
The Birth of the Neighborhoods
As the cord of the city cramped, there was a need to expand. Modern transport options such as trams, buses, and the underground gradually allowed a significant majority of city dwellers to live outside the city center and commute into the center for work. Suburbia emerged as a concept in ancient Rome, but only now it was beginning to establish its true dimension.
The early European suburbs largely accommodated the working class and often stretched along the railway lines which transferred raw resources to factories and moved ready products to other cities and countries. The railways enabled mass production, and they were the veins of the suburbia.
However, the working class suburbs often looked like slums, without sewage and all but decent housing. For instance, in 19th-century Paris, it is estimated that around 30,000 workers resided in communal lodging, often up to ten persons sharing a single room. Things were so bad, that when a cholera outbreak occurred during the summer of 1892 in Hamburg, neighbouring Germany, over 8,500 persons died within a month.
Peoples of the wealthier class saw the working class districts as “outcast” zones, filled with crime, poverty, hopelessness, and trouble. Suburbs were imagined as dangerous, a limbo between the “civilized” urban city centers and the romanticized “countryside” that radiated beyond the city boundaries.
The 19th-century city life remained a demarcation line between the urban and the pastoral. If there was one thing people were becoming nostalgic about, it was nature. The industrial zones also emitted heavy pollution in the urban areas, therefore, those who were well off were fortunate enough to buy or build villas and summer houses away from the cities, eventually forming new types of communities or neighborhoods, very different from the working-class slums.
Urban growth became a clear explanation of the changing relationship between us humans and the surrounding nature.
City life in the 19th-century: Improving City Amenities
Since there was enough pollution, overcrowding, rising crime rates, cholera outbreaks, 19th-century city authorities ultimately recognized the need for more investment in order to improve the livelihood of those who lived in the cities. So, not all was bad. The need for a better life led to reengineering city life, and some city amenities that came to a realization in those early days of the modern urbanism, remain with us to this day.
Sewer systems became a valuable addition to every big city, as well as gas and later electric lighting along all main streets. Sewage was essential, as there was not only an increase in human waste that needed to be managed but also animal waste; working classes brought traces of the countryside life with them. Livestock such as cattle and chicken animated the urban scenes of 19th-century city life; livestock was also critical for providing food. However, the additional waste from the animals only worsened the condition where there was no sewage.
Sewage helped to transform the waste chaos into some form of order. Less odor. Less trash on the streets. Cities like Vienna also invested in systems that rechanneled the Danube to avoid dangerous floodings and that supplied pure water; such systems were in place in the Austrian capital between 1860 and 1875.
The implementation of city lighting allowed safer urban spaces, and the expansion of transportation networks prompted richer populations to inhabit the outskirts of cities. Moving there was a chance to escape the horrible impact of the fully-fuming industrial zones.
But as industrialization successfully removed nature from daily life, public parks and gardens became increasingly popular substitutes for recreation and outdoors. Haussman, the person who led the renewal of Paris during the 19th-century, did not omit parks from the urban plans that were to largely modify the old face of the French capital. Parisian gardens and jardinière from those days, though then-controversial like almost anything Haussman touched a finger on, are today lauded for their beauty and stunning appearance.
Finally, city life in the 19th-century also fostered cultural life and entertainment. More theaters were being opened, and more opera houses. Viennese planners also worked hard to improve the Prater park, which by the end of the century, had something for everyone. Prater included Europe’s largest outdoor theater, as well as it served as an amusement park with a large Ferris wheel alongside soccer fields, paths for walking and cycling, ponds and lakes for boating.
The Rise of the Automobile
Last but not least, throughout the Industrial Revolution, automobiles began replacing horses that were traditionally used for transport. The invention of the internal combustion engine in the 1880s ushered a new era for the four wheels. As horse carriages were substituted with cars and trucks, this new transport led to a powerful adjustment of how business was done. The automobile also allowed for a new and different personal experience of the world.
The mass production of resources such as rubber and aluminum was a direct consequence of the popularization of the automobile. Roads quickly improved cross country. In a nutshell, the automobile changed travel and tourism forever, as people were suddenly enabled to travel both business and leisure.
At the turn of the century, humanity put more faith in the advent of technology. City life in the 19th-century centered around the idea of bigger, better, and stronger, reflected through cities, population, markets, amenities, and transport.
However, it wasn’t for long that the world changed yet once again.
Change in the 20th-century was propelled not so much from the benefit of
technology but rather from the danger of it. New weapons automatized
war. The onset of the two great world wars, packed with a Spanish Flu
pandemic and a period of Great Depression in between, pushed the modern
experience to the limits. Looking back, people had a lot of things to be
nostalgic about, but they also held in their hands the instruments for a
more peaceful future.
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