‘Community’ and the social geography of Victorian cities

Abstract

Quantitative studies of nineteenth-century cities have made rapid advances in the last decade in terms of both the complexity of techniques and the range of sources to which techniques have been applied. Simple representations of material from the census enumerators' books like graphs and pie diagrams have been superseded by location quotients, indices of segregation and factor analyses. Synchronic descriptions of urban structure have been supplemented by assessments of change (for example, of residential persistence and mobility) and analyses of relationships (for example, journeys to work and marriage patterns). Researchers have ventured beyond the census to examine other nominal listings—in directories, electoral registers, ratebooks and church records—often using record linkage techniques to check or supplement information from one source with another. Our enthusiasm to apply new techniques to new sources has often left us exposed to Anderson's criticism that ‘we have been paying too little attention to the question of why we are measuring what we are measuring’. Many quantitative historical geographers justify their enterprise as the testing of modern theory on such subjects as migration and modernization. Some such theories, particularly those concerned with Sjoberg's and Burgess' stereotypes of pre-industrial and industrial cities and the ‘transitional’ nature of Victorian cities, are little more than rough generalizations and some urban historians have been more than sceptical about them. Certainly the retrospective application of the methods, concepts and theories of contemporary social research is a critical issue. In this paper we consider the significance of ‘what we are measuring’ for a particularly contentious concept, that of ‘community’. We assess the usefulness or relevance of more sophisticated methodological techniques to the identification and investigation of communities in Victorian cities.