Martin Hewitt

Making Social Knowledge in the Victorian City – an important contribution to Manchester Historiography

Professor Martin Hewitt, an excellent of historian of Victorian England, has published what is an important addition to the Manchester historiography, which will help both academic and non-academics in their study of Manchester.

Hewitt’s study explores the ‘ecology of knowledge’ of urban Britain in the Victorian period and how the examination of the way in which Victorians comprehended the nature of their urban society, through an exploration of the history of Victorian Manchester, and two specific case studies on the fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton and North and South.

Hewitt discusses how ‘visiting’ was an important aspect of Victorian life for the gathering of statistics to gain knowledge of the city, and in particular the slum areas. He looks at what societies used the ‘visiting mode’ and explains the use of maps in an excellent chapter. He highlights both the positives and negatives use of cartography and how this helped the Medical Officer of Health of Manchester in the late 19th century.

What you do learn that before the advent of Booth and Mayhew, Manchester remained unchallenged as the locus for statistical movements and gathering in England and especially in the provinces. Being able to show that the visiting mode was part of the decaying local statistical gathering as the state came to collect statistics, especially after 1870.

It shows that by visiting, local governments were able to understand where they had population overcrowding and illness hotspots. Where work needed to be done, but it did not solve the invisibility of the poor. While at the same time authority was being transferred from the local philanthropist to the disinterested servant of the state, and how things were moving from the amateur to the professional expert.

Hewitt explains that even with the growing state at the end of the Victorian era, the institutions that carried out visiting were still very much the basis for any reportage on the state of Manchester. That the house to house inquiry remained the gold standard for obtaining both social knowledge and the authority to speak on it.

This book is very much aimed at those who study Victorian Poverty and statistical gathering in the urban setting. It is not for the general history reader, as it may seem unrelatable to their understanding of history. For those trying to under Manchester’s historiography this is an excellent book.… (more)