The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority in the English Industrial City, 1840-1914

This book studies the creation of a distinctive ‘high’ culture in the industrial cities of Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester in the mid-nineteenth century and its incipient decline from the 1880s. It represents a significant contribution both to the study of middle-class cultural forms and to an understanding of the relationship between culture and power, and provides an overview of the public cultures of Victorian ‘respectability’. It argues for the importance of ritualised modes of social behaviour in understanding the construction of authority in the nineteenth-century city. It ranges widely across forms of cultural production and social practice, including architecture, urban design, dress and etiquette, social clubs, music and civic parades.