Chapter 6.2 Life in the Industrial City
Learning Objectives
Hand in hand with industrialization went the process of urbanization. Industrial cities grew by leaps and bounds as workers streamed from the countryside and from overseas to find work in factories and other places of employment. City life was challenging, especially for those whose only experience of urban life had been their nearby market town. The rapidity with which growth and change took place often made it difficult to plan for the orderly development of cities. As a result, cities were dirty and overcrowded. However, they did offer exciting opportunities and benefits not available in the countryside.
The Benefits of Life in the Industrial City
In the nineteenth century, people came to industrial cities largely to find work. Some were also attracted by the excitement of city life. There were many drawbacks to living in nineteenth-century cities, but there were benefits too.
One of the advantages was the wealth of opportunities for leisure and recreation, some of which could be found only in cities. For instance, for the wealthy elite and the growing middle class—the sales representatives, engineers, accountants, and managers on whom industrialization was so dependent—there were libraries and bookstores. Many libraries were subscription libraries that loaned books only to dues-paying members, but free libraries also existed in communities ranging from large cities such as Boston, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and Saint Petersburg, to small towns like Peterborough, New Hampshire
Newspapers abounded; every city published at least one, and some had many more. Theaters staged concerts, plays, ballets, and operas for the wealthy and middle class, but often the working class could observe the action and listen to the music. Even the city of Manaus in the depths of the Brazilian rain forest featured an opera house, built between 1885 and 1892, where rubber barons and the wealthy bankers and merchants who served them could attend operas, plays, and concerts.
Members of the working class had other options for entertainment. Music halls in Britain, burlesque theaters in the United States, and cabarets in Paris featured young women singing and dancing. More often than not, skirts were kicked in the air, an exciting prospect at a time when women’s dresses covered the tops of their shoes. Dance halls attracted men and women every night. Even after long days in factories and offices, young city dwellers found the energy to dance, and many dances, like the tango, which emerged in the 1880s in the dance halls of Buenos Aires, were developed and popularized by working-class men and women.
By the end of the nineteenth century, cities offered yet more forms of entertainment that even the working class could afford. Arcades contained machines that enabled people to watch short films for a small sum. Early movie theaters appeared in cities at the end of the century, featuring silent films wit