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The essays in this collection seek to challenge accepted scholarship on the rural-urban divide. Using case studies from the UK, Europe and America, contributors examine complex rural-urban relationships of conflict and cooperation. The volume will be of interest to those researching society and politics, criminology, literature and demographics.
List of contents
Introduction Mary Hammond and Barry Sloan
Sites of Rural-Urban Encounter
1. Lincoln’s April Fair: Renegotiating Rural and Urban Relations in a small city, c. 1820-1910
Andrew Walker
2. Policing Brough Hill Fair, 1856-1910: Protecting Westmorland from Urban Criminals
Guy Woolnough
3. Urban Unitarians vs. Rural Trinitarians: Town Liberals in a Planter Culture
John A. Macaulay
The Changing World of Work
4. Country Butchers and the City in the Exe Valley, 1840-1900
Julia Neville
5. Doncaster and its Environs: Town and Countryside – a Reciprocal Relationship?
Sarah Holland
6. ‘Following the Tools’: Migration Networks among the Stone Workers of Purbeck in the Nineteenth Century
Andrew Hinde and Michael Edgar
The Impact of Modernity on Rural Life
7. ‘Life in our Villages is practically no Life at all’: Sketching the Rural-Urban Shift in Nineteenth-Century Depictions of Wales
Michelle Deininger
8. The Early Popular Press and its Common Readers in Fin-de-Siècle Prague
Jakub Machek
9. Reorienting the Piney Woods: Rural and Urban Change in South Mississippi, 1830-1910
Reagan Grimsley
Social Mobility and Anxiety
10. The Urbanization of James Carter: Autobiography, Migration and the Rural-Urban Divide in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Christopher Ferguson
11. Pip at the Fingerpost: Nineteenth-Century Urban-Rural Relations and the Reception of Dickens’s Great Expectations, 1860-1885
Mary Hammond
12. Country Bumpkin or Backbone of the Nation?: the Urbanization of the Agricultural Labourer and the ‘Unmanning’ of the English in the later Nineteenth Century
Barry Sloan
About the author
Mary Hammond is Associate Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture at the University of Southampton, UK, and founding Director of the Southampton Centre for Nineteenth-Century Research.
Barry Sloan is Professor of English at the University of Southampton and a member of the Southampton Centre of Nineteenth-Century Research.
