Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as many as one-half of the urban inhabitants of England and Wales lived in small towns. In 1801 62 per cent of all towns with populations of 2,500 or more contained fewer than 5,000 inhabitants and in 1901 30 per cent of all towns still contained less than 10,000 persons. Yet despite the strength of small towns within the national urban system these communities are far from proportionately represented in the large body of academic literature directed towards analysing towns and urban growth. Our knowledge and understanding of the forces of change acting upon towns at the lower end of the urban size hierarchy in this critical transitional period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remains relatively undeveloped, and this is especially true for rural areas untouched by the main wave of industrialization.

Social history, and urban history in particular, has become increasingly concerned, in recent years, with studying the middle class. Historians have progressed from a concern with the ‘success’ or ‘rise’ of the middle classes, to a study them per se both in quantitative and qualitative terms: questions concerning their wealth, consumption patterns, residential preferences, representation within the political leadership as well as their beliefs, values and role in attention. Urban historians have a particular interest in the study of the local middle class, in a way that takes into account the finer detail of different kinds of urban environment and the complexities of the urban experience. Since much of urban history has been at pains to discover the variety of patterns in urban development and urban society, it is not surprising that recent specialized studies of individual towns and cities have revealed a great variety in the bases of class relations. Indeed, the traditional Marxist notion of a single national class interest is now open to qualification. The disparity between London and the provinces in respect of class interests has long been recognized. An extension of the proposition inherent in that disparity will contend here that there were different types of middle class located in different types of urban environment. Such a proposition is not in itself pathfinding or particularly new. There are problems, however, in deciding in what ways such a differentiated pattern can be drawn out, examined and presented in coherent form.

Recent historical studies of social groups have stressed the need to know, in detail at a household and personal level, the precise objective character of individuals and their circumstances – the physical profile – to the extent that these can be defined, quantified and measured. One of the areas of success in the analysis of social change has come in studies that emphasize local situations. The local area – city, town, or district – was the context in which, for all but the small element who formed the upper class, life was conducted, social contacts circumscribed and power struggles and conflicts articulated. Local case-studies, particularly of urban and therefore geographically compact populations, have emerged as a major mechanism through which the details of dynamic social relationships can be identified and juxtaposed.

For a long time historians saw the increased wealth, numbers and power of British manufacturers, merchants and professionals as simply an inevitable part of the process of industrialization. As a result the formation of the class seemed to require no further exploration. More recently interest in the middle class has increased and much closer attention has been given to specific dimensions. It seems evident from this work that any analysis of the middle class faces a number of problems. Firstly, that of definition. There was a wide range of status and income groups within the middle class. What criteria of wealth and occupation should be used, how important is it to fix upper and lower boundaries for the class, how are questions of lifestyle and attitudes to be gauged? Secondly, there were certain divisions within groups who can reasonably be considered middle class by any criteria. Above all, we must note that there was no distinctive middle-class political party and differences were as deeply felt in politics as were antagonisms between Anglicans and Nonconformists in religion. In view of such diversities is it possible to speak of the middle class and, if so, what does class formation and unity consist of? What levels of unity allow or inhibit class power? This is the subject of my overall research, of which only a glimpse can be given here.

This article reviews the potential use of charity records in reconstructing the lives of the poor in the early twentieth-century city and suggests how computer-assisted modes of quantitative and qualitative techniques of analysis can expand the known source base of research on poverty. Although the poor have themselves left only a small direct imprint on the historical record, the historian of poverty has managed to use the diverse and voluminous Victorian records generated by officials of the Poor Law which has resulted in a variety of administrative and institutional analyses of pauperism within various urban and regional settings. These studies have attracted a certain amount of criticism because of their dependence upon a narrow range of sources and orthodox historical methodology. It can be argued, however, that the full potential of Poor Law records in terms of what they contribute as well as what can be done with them has not yet been fully exploited. There is scope, for example, for the linkage of Poor Law material with demographic sources, such as the census enumerators' returns, to explore the geography of urban poverty in the nineteenth century. The value of Poor Law records would be enhanced if research questions could be phrased in relation to the socio-geographical context of the city, taking into account the dynamics of urbanism. For example, in Victorian and Edwardian Leicester it is possible to consider the consequence of socio-economic changes in a move from a domestic to a predominantly factory-based mode of production in the hosiery and footwear trades and the impact of the Poor Law during this transformation as patterns of discrimination characterized the provision of relief in certain districts of the town.

Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, most of the topics associated with the study of urban history have languished largely unstudied beneath a pall of ideologically based neglect. The list of understudied subjects includes urban population, physical structure, social structure, economic activity, urban politics, urban planning and the environment, and urban culture. This lack of interest in urban history directly reflects the emphasis on the role of the peasantry as a creative force in Chinese history. The history of Chinese peasant uprisings and wars became the focus of attention and left little interest for what changes might have taken place in urban settings. Today, a combination of forces has generated considerable changes in the institutional structure of historical studies in China, as well as compelling historians to reconsider established research preferences. In this atmosphere it appears that for the first time since 1949 topics that concern urban historians in the West and Japan are receiving serious attention in the People's Republic of China. While it is still too early to speak of urban history in China, continuation of current trends in historical research over the next five to ten years will almost certainly bring this specialization into existence.