9 - Urban utopias: socialism, religion and the city, 1880 to 1900

Summary

Linguistic liaisons and transformations lie at the heart of the struggle to explain and debate the nature of social structures at the end of the nineteenth century. At the same time that political activists, philanthropists and urban planners were changing the face of the concrete urban world, the questions they were asking were modifying public discourse by exposing its inadequacies in formulating relevant questions and in offering acceptable answers.

From the opening of the eighties there was a general sense that the thinking about social issues had overtaken the public discourse available to articulate it. The ‘unintended irony’ of the sociological writings of this period highlights the strains that were becoming apparent. By the close of the 1880s, Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People: Poverty Series had explicitly stated the need for an ‘objective’ language. Yet his writings reveal how difficult this was to achieve. The record of his observations is constrained by the poverty of a language that described the poor as ‘thriftless’, ‘loafers’ and ‘scroungers’. His recognition of this problem and his attempts to find a more objective terminology created a linguistic conflict that channelled him reluctantly towards ‘quasi-socialism’, a position which held little conviction for him politically or intellectually. The reality of the difficulties he faced are underlined by his evident relief when he describes the educated artisan class where the language at his disposal at last fits the observable social facts.

Indirectly, these linguistic tensions constituted an attack on church authority.