Black Country Elites

Black Country Elites is a study of the people who ran Victorian industrial towns; it also examines the institutions policies rituals and networks these urban elites deployed to cope with urban growth social unrest and relative economic decline. Concentrating on a particularly grimy district of the industrial Midlands the book demonstrates the surprisingly great resources coherence sophistication and impact of the area's mainly middle-class leaders who were well linked to regional and national power centres. Richard H. Trainor's extensively researched and richly documented analysis suggests the need to re-examine the influential view that Victorian Britain's social development was dominated by London and by land the professions and finance. Instead he indicates the complex give-and-take between the metropolis and its notables on the one hand and the industrial provinces and their leaders on the other. The book is both a substantial addition to regional studies of Victorian Britain and an important contribution to the history of nineteenth-century elites and of the urban middle class.