Making Social Knowledge in the Victorian City challenges prevailing Foucauldian interpretations of the formation of social knowledge in Victorian Britain. Through a close study of Manchester, its institutions, practices, and representations of society, it argues that Victorian senses of the city did not banish time, construct space as flat and legible, or render the working classes as massified and inert. In fact, because the dominant mode of social investigation remained the ‘visiting mode’, a set of practices rooted in the door to door activities of urban philanthropy and proselytisation, exactly the reverse was the case. Through an exploration of urban map-making, case studies of the sanitary and education movements, and the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell, Making Social Knowledge demonstrates that Victorian knowledge about urban populations remained visual, historicised, differentiated, and statistically naive until the very end of the Victorian period.
Reviewers’ Comments
‘Hewitt’s deep research and careful arguments challenge the Foucauldians on their own ground, using the statisticians and their opponents in the nineteenth century as a mirror to the Foucauldians and their critics today, and arguing instead that “social knowledge was material, morphological and multidimensional”’. Mark Crinson in Victorian Studies, 64.2 (), 311.
’a closely argued and well written case-study of how Victorian reformers used social visiting to produce a particular form of social knowledge to tackle what they believed were the physical and moral ills of urban society’. Katrina Navickas in English Historical Review, 136:580 (2021); 741-743.
‘a fascinating and invaluable corrective to Joyce’s instrumentalism’. Simon Morgan in Northern History, 59:2, 322-324.
Martin Hewitt 