In recent years historians have begun to put flesh on the bones of the modern British middle class. This chapter deals with the issues of social structure, roles played by middle-class individuals and groups in the broader economic, social and political life of urban Britain. It examines the relative size, the occupational structure and the internal stratification of the urban middle class, paying particular attention to variations between the urban provinces and the urban South- East. Public involvements by the urban middle class had significant consequences both for the middle class itself and for urban society more generally. Middle-class interventions in public affairs varied not only over time but also among different types of urban settlement. In the economic sphere, while the rising numbers of middle-class rentiers were detached, top industrialists and merchants were especially influential in bodies such as Chambers of Commerce and employers organisations.

During the decades of the 1870s and 1880s, urban mortality, fertility and nuptiality patterns all appear to have almost simultaneously begun to enter a new era. The demographic history of urban Britain during the period 1840-1950 is particularly dominated by the dramatic changes in mortality and fertility occurring during the central decades of that period. However, attempts to verify empirically a direct relationship between mortality and fertility change in this period in Britain including careful efforts to distinguish infant from child and other forms of mortality, have only resulted in negative or contradictory statistical findings. This chapter offers separate treatments of the history of changing urban mortality and fertility, reflecting the two distinct bodies of historiography. Two principal features dominate urban mortality patterns in the period 1840 to 1950, initially high death rates, and a gradual shift in the main causes of death from infectious to chronic and degenerative diseases.

This chapter focuses on the dynamic aspects of the interaction between towns and consumption. For the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in fact, most of the historical work linking towns and consumption focuses on developments in urban retailing rather than directly on the changing attitudes and expectations of the consumers themselves. An understanding of the social history of consumption needs to be based on the manufacturing and marketing of products as well as their direct delivery to consumers. The rise of consumerism as a mass phenomenon, entailing the spread of a general capacity and desire to choose between and enjoy an array of nonessential goods and services. Urban consumption began with the manufacture of goods. This was increasingly an urban activity, as industry continued the move from the countryside. Towns, and especially cities, thus became theatres of conspicuous consumption and display in a public setting open to the gaze of all.