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Civilizing the Urban: Popular Culture and Public Space in Merthyr, C.1870-1914

(Hardback)


Publishing Details

Full Title:

Civilizing the Urban: Popular Culture and Public Space in Merthyr, C.1870-1914

Contributors:

By (Author) Andy Croll

ISBN:

9780708316375

Publisher:

University of Wales Press

Imprint:

University of Wales Press

Publication Date:

22nd March 2001

Country:

United Kingdom

Classifications

Readership:

Tertiary Education

Fiction/Non-fiction:

Non Fiction

Main Subject:
Other Subjects:

Social and cultural history
Popular culture

Dewey:

942.975

Physical Properties

Physical Format:

Hardback

Number of Pages:

330

Dimensions:

Width 138mm, Height 216mm

Description

Early industrial Merthyr is synonymous with the darker side of the British urban experience. The rapid and unplanned growth, acute social unrest and appallingly high death rates that shocked and horrified many Victorian observers continues to draw historians to this period, yet little is known about the efforts to construct a 'civic image' for late-Victorian and Edwardian Merthyr. This book considers the efforts of a group of dedicated civic 'boosters' to civilize the town's public spaces and its inhabitants and shows how this vision of Merthyr depended on the taming and regulation of popular culture. Streets crowded with respectable choral singers and well-behaved rugby fans were often interpreted as proof that civic Merthyr had arrived; the presence of public drunks, pugilists and prostitutes suggested otherwise. Civilizing the Urban traces elements of the fascinating journey from the 'urban' to the 'civic' and develops new ways of understanding the often uneasy relationship between popular culture, public space and urban meaning in the context of the nineteenth-century British 'civic project'.

Reviews

'...this trenchant study...is meticulously researched, rigorous in its conceptual apparatus and lucidly written...Merthyr is a fascinating case study of the civic project...' English Historical Review 'Andy Croll has chosen to look at an unexplored aspect of the town, its transition from the shock town of the Welsh industrial revolution to a civic community with pretensions to urbanity. His gracefully written book is an engagement with the emerging historical problem of urban space...there is much here for historians of leisure, towns and of 19th-century British society in general.' History Today

Author Bio

Andy Croll is a Lecturer in History at the University of Glamorgan. He is the author of several articles on urban culture and social order in nineteenth-century England and Wales.

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