The Victorian Era

What Was Victorian Manchester Like

Article · Cities & Entertainment · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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Victorian Manchester was the great cotton city of the period, the commercial capital of industrial Lancashire, and one of the most dynamic — and most closely studied — urban centres in the world. Its population grew from about 142,000 in 1801 to about 544,000 in 1901, and by the 1840s it was already the largest manufacturing city in the world. Friedrich Engels lived here and wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) from his observations in the city; Alexis de Tocqueville visited in 1835 and was astonished by what he saw; and the Manchester School of economists, with Richard Cobden and John Bright at its head, exported the doctrine of free trade to the world. The wider context of the provincial cities is examined in Victorian Cities Beyond London.

The Cotton Industry

Manchester owed its growth to cotton. Raw cotton from the American South, from India, and from Egypt was imported through the port of Liverpool, spun into yarn in the mills of south Lancashire, and woven, bleached, dyed, printed, and finished in the workshops and factories of Manchester and the surrounding towns. By 1860 the Manchester area was producing the majority of the cotton goods traded in the world, and the city was the commercial, financial, and managerial centre of the trade. The Royal Exchange (opened 1869 in the great hall designed by Edward Walters) and the warehouses of King Street and St Ann’s Square housed the merchants, brokers, and shippers who handled the trade.

The industry was concentrated in the great mills of the eastern districts of the city — Ancoats, Chorlton, Hulme, Gorton, and Openshaw — and along the Rochdale Canal and the River Irwell. The Ancoats mill, designed by Matthew Robinson and built in 1796, is sometimes called the world’s first true factory. The Cotton Supply Association, founded in 1857 after the brief panic caused by the American Civil War, was based in the city.

The cotton trade brought two great crises to Manchester in the Victorian period. The first was the Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1861–65, when the Union blockade of the Confederate ports during the American Civil War cut off the supply of raw cotton from the American South. Half the workforce of the cotton towns was put out of work, soup kitchens and relief funds were organised across the country, and the memory of the famine shaped Manchester’s politics for a generation. The second was the long decline of the trade from the 1890s onwards, as competition from Bombay and Osaka, with their cheaper labour, began to eat into the export market.

Politics and the Free Trade Movement

Manchester was the home of modern British radical politics. The Manchester Guardian, founded in 1821 by John Edward Taylor after the Peterloo Massacre, was for most of the nineteenth century the most important liberal newspaper in England. The Anti-Corn Law League, founded in the city in 1838 by Richard Cobden and John Bright, campaigned for the repeal of the Corn Laws and helped to bring down Sir Robert Peel’s government in 1846. The Manchester School of economics — Cobden, Bright, and their circle — argued for free trade, peace, and internationalism, and through the 1840s and 1850s it set the intellectual agenda of British Liberalism.

The political radicalism of the city went back further than the Victorian period. The Peterloo Massacre of 16 August 1819, in which a cavalry charge into a peaceful reform meeting in St Peter’s Field killed fifteen people and injured hundreds, is the founding event of the city’s political identity. The monument to the dead, designed by Edward Walters and unveiled in 1892, still stands.

Buildings and Institutions

The great building of the Victorian city is the Manchester Town Hall, designed by Alfred Waterhouse and opened by Queen Victoria in 1877. Its Gothic Revival exterior, its great hall, and its mural paintings by Ford Madox Brown are among the most ambitious civic works of the century. The Free Trade Hall (1853–56, Edward Walters, on the site of the Peterloo meeting) housed public meetings, concerts, and political gatherings; the great hall of the Mechanics’ Institute (1857, J. E. Gregan) was a centre of adult education; and the Owens College (1851, the seed of the Victoria University and the later University of Manchester) was the most successful of the Victorian civic colleges outside the ancient universities.

The cultural life of the city also included the Manchester Art Gallery (1823, rebuilt 1880s), the Manchester Museum (1867), the Hallé Orchestra (founded 1858 by Charles Hallé), the Royal Manchester Institution, and the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts. Manchester was a centre of the Lancashire cotton-bleaching and calico-printing trades, and the textile design produced in the region, particularly in the calico works of Bury and Rossendale, was a distinctive contribution to the visual culture of the period.