In 1700 over three-quarters of the British
population still lived in the countryside; only 13 per cent, it has
been estimated, dwelt in towns with over 5,000 inhabitants. But by
1800 the urban proportion had risen to 2.5 per cent and by 1851 the
inhabitants of the towns were in a majority. Moreover, these
nineteenth-century towns were more sharply differentiated from the
country than their early modern predecessors had been. Before the
end of the eighteenth century England had become, with the
exception of the Netherlands, easily the most urbanized country in
Europe. This great environmental change affected vast numbers of
people and with it began a great lament about the growth of cities
and an intensification 'the harsh distinction between rural
and urban life'.
In Renaissance times the city had been synonymous
with civility, the country with rusticity and boorishness. To bring
men out of the forests and to contain them in a city was to
civilize them. As an Elizabethan dialogue put it, a gentleman
brought up in the town would be more 'civil' than one reared in the
country. The town was the home of learning, manners, taste
and sophistication. It was the arena of human fulfilment. Adam had
been placed in a garden, and Paradise was associated with flowers
and fountains. But when men thought of heaven they usually
envisaged it as a city, a new Jerusalem. For centuries
town walls had symbolized security and human achievement; and to
the traveller their sight was always reassuring. In his tour in the
1530s John Leland often commented on the visual pleasures of the
townscape: the 'pretty market' at Leeds; the 'fair streets' of
Exeter; the radiance of Bewdley glittering 'as it were of gold' at
sunrise; the 'beauty' of Birmingham. Rice Merrick, the Tudor
historian of Glamorgan, thought Cardiff 'beautified with many fair
houses and large streets', while in the 1690s Celia Fiennes could
readily take pleasure in the sight of a 'neat town'. In the
eighteenth century there was much satisfaction expressed at the
beauty of the London squares and the new buildings in Bath or
Edinburgh New Town; and we know that in 1802. Wordsworth thought
that earth had nothing fairer to show than the sleeping city of
London seen from Westminster Bridge.
Yet, long before 1802, it had become a commonplace
to maintain that the countryside was more beautiful than the town.
'No one,' wrote William Shenstone in 1748, 'will prefer the beauty
of a street to the beauty of a lawn or grove; and indeed the poets
would have found no very tempting an Elysium, had they made
a town of it.' It was partly the physical
deterioration in the urban environment which encouraged this view.
There had been complaints about London air since the thirteenth
century. By Elizabethan times the increasing use of coal for
industrial as well as domestic purposes had created a major
pollution problem. Queen Elizabeth stayed away from the capital
city in 1578 because of the 'noisome smells'; and for centuries the
first sight of the capital caught by approaching travellers was the
overhanging pall of smog. Margaret Cavendish records the emotion
felt by her husband, the royalist Marquis of Newcastle, when,
returning from enforced exile in 1660, he caught sight once more of
'the smoke of London, which he had not seen in a long time'. An
early-eighteenth-century poet wrote:
While thus retir'd, I on the city
look,
A group of buildings in a cloud of
smoke.
The coal which was burned in the early modern
period contained twice as much sulphur as that commonly used today;
and its effects were correspondingly lethal. The smoke darkened the
air, dirtied clothes, ruined curtains, killed flowers and trees and
corroded buildings. By the mid eighteenth century the statues in
London of some of the Stuart kings were so black that they looked
like chimney sweeps or Africans in royal
costume.
