Work, Life and Leisure........ Part I

SUB TOPICS OF THE CHAPTER

Characteristics of the City
Social Change in the City
Politics in the City
The City in Colonial India
Cities and the Challenge of the Environment

I. Answer the following questions:-

Q 1. What were the characteristic features of cities?

1. Cities vary greatly in size and complexity. 
2. They can be densely settled modern-day metropolises which combine  support very large populations. 
3. Cites were often the centers of political power,administrative network, trade and industry, religious institutions and intellectual activity.
4. They supported various social groups such as artisans, merchants and priests.
5. They can also be smaller urban centers with limited functions.

Q 2. Give a brief description of London as a city in the 19th century.

1. Over the nineteenth century London expanded and its population multiplied four fold in the 70 years between 1810 and 1880 increasing from 1 million to about 4 million.
2. The city of London acted as a powerful magnet for migrant populations.
3. According to historian Gareth Stedman Jones ‘Nineteenth century London was a city of clerks and shopkeepers,small masters, skilled artisans and semi skilled including sweated outworkers, soldiers and servants, casual labourers, street sellers, and beggars.’
4. Apart from the London dockyards there were five major types of industries employed large numbers: clothing and footwear, wood and furniture, metals and engineering, printing and stationery, and precision products such as surgical instruments, watches, and objects of precious metal.
5. During the First World War (1914-18) London began manufacturing motor cars and electrical goods, and the number of large factories increased and they accounted for nearly one-third of all jobs in the city.

Q 3.Describe the marginal groups of mid-19th century London.

1. When London grew as industrial city crime flourished. 
2. It is estimated that 20,000 criminals were living in London in the 1870's.
3. In the mid-nineteenth century ‘criminals’ were in poor people who lived by stealing lead from roofs, food from shops, lumps of coal and clothes drying on hedges. 
4. There were others who were more skilled at their trade, expert at their jobs  were the cheats and pickpockets, tricksters  and petty thieves crowding the streets of London. 
5. Factories employed large numbers of women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 
6. With technological developments women lost their industrial jobs and were forced to work within households and the vast majority of them were recent migrants. 
7. A large number of women also used their homes to increase family income by taking in lodgers ,tailoring, washing or matchbox making. In the twentieth century women got employment in wartime industries and offices and withdrew from domestic service.
8. Large number of children were pushed into low-paid work, often by their parents.
9. With the passage of the Compulsory Elementary Education Act in 1870 and the factory acts from 1902 children were kept out of industrial work.

Q 4. What is a Tenement?

1. Tenement – Run-down and often overcrowded apartment house, especially in a poor section of a large city.

Q 5.Why was housing a main concern in the city of London?

1. London population increased when people began migrating after the Industrial Revolution. 
2. Factory or workshop owners did not house the migrant workers.
3. Individual landowners put up cheap and unsafe tenements for the migrants.
4. The better-off city dwellers demanded to clear the slums.
5. Gradually a larger and larger number of people began to recognise the need for housing for the poor.
6. First the vast mass of one-room houses occupied by the poor were seen as a serious threat to public health as they were overcrowded, badly ventilated, and lacked sanitation. 
7. Second, there were worries about fire hazards created by poor housing. 
8. Third, there was a fear of social disorder after the Russian Revolution in 1917. 
9. Workers’ mass housing schemes were planned to prevent the London poor from turning rebellious.

Q 6. List some steps taken to clean up the city of London.

1. A variety of steps were taken to clean up London. 
2. Attempts were made to de-congest localities.
3. Green and open spaces were created to reduce pollution. 
4. Landscaping of the city was started.
5. Large blocks of apartments were built similar to those in Berlin and New York which had similar housing problems. 
6. Rent control was introduced in Britain during the First World War to ease the impact of a severe housing shortage.
7. Between the two World Wars (1919-39) the responsibility for housing the working classes was taken by the British state, and a million houses, most of them single-family cottages, were built by local authorities.

Q 7.What led to the development of London Underground Railway? Why was it criticized?

1. As the London city extended beyond, people could no more walk to their work places.
2. Therefore development of suburbs made new forms of mass transport necessary.
3. The London underground railway solved the housing crisis by carrying large masses of people to and from the city.
4. The  first section of the Underground in the world opened on 10 January 1863 between Paddington and Farrington Street in London and on that day 10,000 passengers were carried, with trains running every ten minutes.
5. It was criticized because many felt that the ‘iron monsters’ added to the mess and unhealthiness of the city.
6. People were afraid to travel underground with smoke filled underground railway.
7. To make approximately two miles of railway, 900 houses had were destroyed.
8. The London tube railway led to a massive displacement of the London poor between the two World Wars.

Q 8. How was the family life affected by industrialization?

1. In the eighteenth century, the family was unit of production and consumption as well as of political decision-making. 
2. The function and the shape of the family were completely transformed by life in the industrial city.
3. Ties between members of households loosened.
4. Among the working class the institution of marriage tended to break down and women of the upper and middle classes in Britain faced higher levels of isolation.
5. Their lives were made easier by domestic maids who cooked, cleaned and cared for young children on low wages.
6. Women who worked for wages had some control over their lives, particularly among the lower social classes. 
7. But many social reformers felt that the family as an institution had broken down, and needed to be saved or reconstructed by pushing the women back into the home.

Q 9. What were the Chartist and the 10-hour movements?

1. These political movements mobilized large numbers of men.
2. Chartism-a movement demanding the vote for all adult males.
3. The 10-hour movement was related to limiting hours of work in factories.

Q 10. How did the urban family life transform in the 20th century?

1. By the twentieth century, the urban family had been transformed by the experience of the valuable wartime work done by women, who were employed in large numbers to meet war demands. 
2. The family now consisted of much smaller units.
3. The family became the heart of a new market – of goods and services, and of ideas. 
4. The new industrial city provided opportunities for mass work, and also raised the problem of mass leisure on Sundays and other common holidays.

Q 11.What forms of leisure activities came up in urbanized London?

1. For wealthy Britishers, there was an annual ‘London Season’. 
2. Several cultural events, such as the opera, the theater and classical music performances were organised for an elite group of 300-400 families. 
3. Working classes met in pubs to have a drink, exchange news and sometimes also to organise for political action.
4. Many new types of large-scale entertainment for the common people came into being, some made possible with money from the state. 
5. Libraries, art galleries and museums were established in the nineteenth century to provide people with a sense of history and pride in the achievements of the British. 
6. Music halls were popular among the lower classes.
7. By the  twentieth century, cinema became the great mass entertainment for mixed audiences.
8. British industrial workers were increasingly encouraged to spend their holidays by the sea, so as to derive the benefits of the sun and bracing winds.

Q 12."Large city population can be both a threat and an opportunity". How can it be a threat?
"Large city population can be both a threat and an opportunity."For example:-

1. In the severe winter of 1886, when outdoor work came to a standstill, the London poor exploded in a riot, demanding relief from the terrible conditions of poverty. 
2. Alarmed shopkeepers closed down their establishments, fearing the 10,000-strong crowd that was marching from Deptford to London. The marchers had to be dispersed by the police. 
3. A similar riot occurred in late 1887; this time, it was brutally suppressed by the police in what came to be known as the Bloody Sunday of November 1887.
4. Two years later, thousands of London’s dockworkers went on strike and marched through the city. According to one writer, ‘thousands of the strikers had marched through the city without a pocket being picked or a window being broken …’ The 12-day strike was called to gain recognition for the dockworkers’ union.

From these examples we can see that 

1. The large masses of people could be drawn into political causes in the city. 
2. A large city population was thus both a threat and an opportunity.  
3. State authorities went to great lengths to reduce the possibility of rebellion and enhance urban aesthetics, as the example of Paris shows.

Q 13.Who was Baron Haussmann? What was his contribution to the city of Paris?

1. In 1852, Louis Napoleon III crowned himself emperor.
2. After taking over, he undertook the rebuilding of Paris with vigour. The chief architect of the new Paris was Baron Haussmann, the Prefect of the Seine.
3. His name stands for the forcible reconstruction of cities to enhance their beauty and impose order. 
4. The poor were evicted from the centre of Paris to reduce the possibility of political rebellion and to beautify the city.
5. For 17 years after 1852, Haussmann rebuilt Paris. Straight, broad avenues or boulevards and open spaces were designed, and full-grown trees transplanted. 
6. By 1870, one-fifth of the streets of Paris were Haussmann’s creation. 
7. In addition, policemen were employed, night patrols were begun, and bus shelters and tap water introduced.
8. Public works on this scale employed a large number of people: one in five working persons in Paris was in the building trade in the 1860's. 
9. This reconstruction displaced up to 350,000 people from the centre of Paris.
10. Even some of the wealthier inhabitants of Paris thought that the city had been monstrously transformed. 
11. The Goncourt brothers lamented the passing of an earlier way of life, and the development of an upper-class culture. 
12. Others believed that Haussmann had ‘killed the street’ and its life, to produce an empty, boring city, full of similar-looking boulevards and facades. 
13. Paris became the hub of many new architectural, social and intellectual developments that were very influential right through the twentieth century, even in other parts of the globe.

Q 14. Describe some common features of the three Presidency cities of colonial India.

1. The three Presidency cities were multi-functional cities:
2. They had major ports, warehouses, homes and offices, army camps, as well as educational institutions, museums and libraries. 
3. Bombay was the premier city of India.