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By Root 1675 0

the poor and the mansions of the rich,” and turn themselves into “great men of science, literature and art?”22 Or was it a place where millions of people, cruelly and unjustly expelled from the peaceful certainties of peasant life, were thrust into generations of filth, disease, proletarian servitude, and consumerism? The latter view is forcefully argued not just in Dickens and in Friedrich Engels but in that masterpiece of historical narrative, E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, which forcefully casts the entire era as tragedy.

The first view is cruelly deaf to the terrible struggles and punishments of the poor. But the second is equally deaf to their motives, for any detailed study of the nineteenth-century city reveals that most of its newly arrived inhabitants were not at all passive victims and that the social mechanisms of the arrival city most often functioned as a great collective instrument for raising living standards above the levels of perpetual rural poverty, if not higher.

It is now possible to address this question with facts, for the past two decades have seen a revolution in the techniques of analyzing social mobility—both intergenerational mobility (did you end up better or worse off than your parents?) and intragenerational mobility (did you end up better or worse off than you were born?). The most comprehensive and well-documented study of the mobility question to date, conducted by the British social historian Andrew Miles, found that the arrival city changed its nature as the century went on. After mid-century, there was a change: Social barriers became more and more permeable, and both sorts of mobility increased throughout the century’s final decades.

A man’s chances of escaping the income category of his birth rose from one in three at the beginning of the nineteenth century to one in two at the end. By that time, between a quarter and a third of the British middle class and an eighth of the higher professional and managerial classes comprised people who had been born in the lower classes, most of whom had presumably used the arrival cities of London and Manchester as their gateways to advancement—a higher level of mobility, by Miles’s measurement, than existed at the end of the twentieth century.

There were limits to this mobility. While a majority of poor people entering the city were able to rise within a generation from unskilled working-poor status to the far more comfortable and stable skilled-worker or tradesman status, only 5 percent of working-class men at the beginning of the twentieth century were able to obtain middle-class status.§ Much of this has to do with property ownership. In nineteenth-century Europe, it was almost unthinkable for even the most elevated members of the working class to purchase the land beneath their feet. Thus, comfortable-artisan living was often the highest attainable level for a rural arrival.23

It was the chaotic, mercantile arrival city, not the well-ordered rural village or regional town, that made this upward mobility possible. At some point in mid-century, the arrival city turned from a trap door into an escape hatch. The economic historian Jason Long has found that between 1851 and 1901, in England and Wales, half of all sons ended up in different classes than their fathers and that the rate of upward mobility was 40 percent greater than that of downward mobility.24

But, contrary to Smiles, this was no simple matter of self-help and individual guile. The years of increasing social mobility, in fact, also happen to be the years during which public education, child-labor laws, hygiene and housing reforms, and rudimentary social welfare were introduced, and numerous studies have found that the two trends tracked one another. Indeed, during that first great human migration, you could describe two eras of the arrival city: the one before 1848, when urban life was tempting but the odds of failure were no better than even, and the one after 1848, when a better life, for your children, if not yourself, was more likely than not.

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