Sites of Sound

Historians of the city concur that the nineteenth century was a particularly incandescent moment in urban development, both in terms of material and perceptual space (Morris and Rodger 1993b:1): [quotation omitted]. Through both internal migration and national increase (from nine million in 1801 to 36 million by 1911), by the end of the nineteenth century the urban population in England and Wales had grown from 33.8 percent of the total in 1801 to 78.9 percent by 1911, with the biggest growth rates between 1821 and 1881 (Williams 1973:217; Morris and Rodger 1993b:3). There are of course various ways of defining "urban," but some raw figures are sufficiently eloquent for present purposes. "In 1801 only London contained more than one million people--still well over eleven times the size of its nearest rival, Liverpool. By 1861 there were sixteen places already in the 100,000-plus category, and by 1911, there were forty-two" (Morris and Rodger 1993b:2). Reflecting the connection between urbanization and industrialization, the greatest rate of urban expansion was to be found in manufacturing towns, particularly those in the north including Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Birmingham, and Liverpool, increasing in size by up to 40 percent in a decade (Williams 1973:220). These converging forces in nineteenth-century urbanization clearly suggest complicity with the consolidation of class divisions associated with capitalism, the confrontations between a dominant bourgeoisie and the working class. The growing conurbation was also "a site of class formation" (Morris and Rodger 1993b:26).