Local and regional newspapers became well established in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The lifting of stamp duties, advances in communication, printing and transportation, the expansion of literacy and the growth of local democracy were among the various processes stimulating far greater levels of output and bringing much wider press representation. Newspapers performed a range of important political, economic, social and cultural functions on behalf of their host towns and cities. They were essential agents in promoting long-standing and new civic institutions and organizations. The stance of newspapers could be a critical factor in determining the fortunes of local associations and individuals. The press also assisted in the creation and consolidation of geographical spheres of political influence and of economic and financial exchange. In addition, publications articulated local senses of place identity: uncontested and contested, as well as real and imagined. The significance of provincial newspapers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has, correspondingly, stimulated considerable historical research, including numerous general studies evaluating the role of the press in British society.Footnote 1 The historiography also incorporates much local study, which considers individual publications and the urban centres that they represented in a broader social, political and cultural context.Footnote 2 Furthermore, some historians have placed great emphasis on the appealing qualities – if also the methodological challenges – of using newspapers as a primary source: ‘There is certainly no contemporary document more redolent of local identity and municipal pride.’Footnote 3
The political function of newspapers became very sophisticated. The growth of the provincial press coincided with the expansion of local democracy and inclusiveness, the development of civic pride and municipal self-expression and progress in welfare reform and urban improvement. The press had an instrumental role to perform in reporting on local political activity and governance, if for the most part underpinning the status quo as established by municipal and business elites – which could include newspaper proprietors. However, newspapers could be quick to deviate from conformity with dominant and ‘official’ ideologies in pursuit of popular endorsement from its readership or from more radical constituencies. The press might adopt a markedly more progressive line than local political representatives, employing detailed fact-based observation and commentary in order to inform its campaigns for reform. Issues of public health, overcrowding and housing supply, for example, featured regularly and widely as typical agenda items for editors and reporters.Footnote 4
The local press skilfully blended fact and hyperbole in its quest for authority, legitimacy and subscriber numbers. Provincial newspaper proprietors and editors were quite typically representing towns and cities that were vying with other centres for regional leadership, and could also find themselves in competition with other press publications in the pursuit of the same task. Newspapers would draw on the genre of boosterism in pushing forward political as well as economic and cultural agenda. Boosterism was a mode of discourse accustomed to presenting wordy, heady or excessive claims regarding the greatness of a particular city. Boosterist expression was not exclusive to newspapers. The press was especially effective in deploying it, but it was also utilized in other media produced to serve political parties and associations, as well as commercial or cultural organizations and interests. Boosters, if not already influential members of local political, commercial and wealth elites, would seek to align themselves with them. Boosters sought to champion the economic success and future potential of their own city at a time of great industrial and urban growth, together with attendant stiff competition with other regional cities. Boosterist writers also celebrated and promoted prowess in local culture and the arts. Booster columnists were attracted to similar topics, such as: enlightened attitudes towards reform, civil order and good governance, commercial and industrial innovation, impressive architectural projects, developments in infrastructure and service planning and notable cultural and artistic facilities and events. Civic patriotism combined with faith in the benefits of economic progress as well as aspiration for community solidarity. Boosterism features quite popularly in urban-historical studies. The term can be found inserted in passing, to acknowledge the presence of emphatic place-promotional discourse, or subject to fuller conceptualization and contextualization – particularly in research on the North American experience.Footnote 5
Boosterism was inherently partial, with its discourse likely to give emphasis to, or evade, areas of tension and contradiction. Its authors picked between the contrasting local claims to what was of significance for a particular city, or what was in its best interests. Boosters might well involve themselves in the conflicts that could arise between the promotion of a city's sense of its status and the nature of its development in the present, and the preservation of older, more historical activities, customs and identities. Through the twentieth century, boosterism would mutate, typically with the turning of the economic fortunes of many major centres. Boosters would aim to perpetuate the language associated with the preceding phase of growth and improvement of their cities, or would turn to a more ancient past as a reference point for evolving and renewing civic character. Boosterism featured prominently in the years following World War I, a phase associated with post-Blitz reconstruction and post-austerity revival. In the later twentieth and into the early twenty-first centuries, the rebranding of cities as heritage, tourism and cultural centres has also been a widely shared preoccupation for boosters.Footnote 6
Boosters share with antiquarians and historians a fascination for the local past. However, a distinctive and essential trait within boosterist writing is making a connection between the past and the future, and expressing concern for ensuring the civic well-being of tomorrow. Boosterism's heyday was in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. During that period, its authors, if quite typically uncritically: gloried in the past, promoted the present and promised great times ahead. Boosterism still occupies a place and relevance in contemporary historical scholarship, with some authors juxtaposing, if perhaps uncomfortably, objective and critical analysis of a city's past alongside a celebration and promotion of its present.Footnote 7
Bernard Gilbert, the Lincolnshire Echo and the city of Lincoln
This study of Lincoln is based on an analysis of the work of a single contributor to one provincial newspaper: Bernard Samuel Gilbert and his articles for the Lincolnshire Echo. His writings provide a stimulating literary context for exploring the interrelationship between provincial newspapers and local politics and government, and the adoption by press commentators of a range of critical and boosterist stances. Gilbert's articles are an illuminating source for exploring local and more general circumstances prevailing in 1914 in relation to: population expansion, housing pressures, working conditions, welfare reform, urban enhancement and civic culture. He discusses short- and longer-term causal processes, as well as pragmatic and more utopian factors contributing to change. Gilbert also integrates empirical observation with more exuberant and creative expression of a boosterist nature. His 19 articles for the Echo, generally between 1,000 and 1,500 words in length each, form a large body of material. They appeared in editions of the newspaper over the course of six months from February 1914. Popular reception to them persuaded the Echo to collect them together in a book publication in the same year, Living Lincoln. The ‘Foreword’ to the publication claims, if with a note of caution:
When these articles appeared they aroused such widespread interest that the publisher, thinking them worthy of a more permanent setting, decided to issue them in a book form. They are not intended to set down in detail the forces at work in the social and commercial life of the city, but are merely the impression of one who, being a country-man by birth and up-bringing, has come to live under the shadow of the Minster.Footnote 8
Gilbert's articles for the Echo on urban life are certainly something of a curiosity. His background and interests were firmly rooted in the rural scene. He was born to the south of Lincoln, and until the age of 30 he was employed in his family's seed merchant business. It was his turn to professional writing that would take him to Lincoln, briefly, and then to London, where he died in 1927 at the age of 45. Over his 15-year writing career, Gilbert's various works of literature (including poems, novels, plays and pamphlets) would be dominated by his consideration of country life, much in dialect verse. The work of Gilbert for the Lincolnshire Echo is also unexpected in that the newspaper was Conservative in its political leanings. The Echo was a relatively new publication, appearing in 1899. It joined five longer-standing county papers, all founded between 1833 and 1869.Footnote 9 Gilbert's writings were frequently radical in their tone, and in some of his publications he explicitly challenged central Conservative party policy.Footnote 10 He became the secretary of the Lincolnshire Farmers’ Union and dedicated his second book, a work of political commentary on the state of agriculture, to the National Farmers’ Union.Footnote 11 In addition, he had published five political pamphlets on agrarian economy and society by the end of 1914. Nonetheless, his Echo articles on city life are diverse, well observed and insightful, their approach drawing on his experience of quite prolific critical and creative writing acquired over the preceding two years. In Gilbert's pre-1914 poetry, he had clearly relished stereotyping and parodying rural and urban life, generally expressing his preference for the former. In one of his first poems, for example, the city is cast in a relatively less favourable light:
However, during Gilbert's first spell of city living, through 1914, he was generally and consistently positive about the merits of urban culture. In ‘The city streets’, one of his 19 articles, he claims: ‘to one who desires companionship, and who loves humanity, there can be no comparison. For human nature you must go to the town.’Footnote 13 Gilbert's articles provide various perspectives on the life and changing character of Lincoln. The contents are rich descriptions of the city pre-1914, if, in places, indicating Gilbert's personal preferences. He was greatly animated by sport, for example: ‘Sincil Bank [the home of the city's football team] is a word of magic and a centre of attraction to more people than all the churches and chapels put together.’Footnote 14 He was equally attracted to horseracing on the city's West Common: ‘What a democratic sport! How the hope of getting a sovereign for sixpence animates the multitude!’Footnote 15 Gilbert was also fascinated by the cinema, if not all films: ‘too often the majority are Yankee rubbish – melodramatic twaddle and sentiment’.Footnote 16 He was less enthusiastic as well about the style of worship associated with the city's cathedral: ‘the independence bread in my bones stirs as I listen here. Harsh and unlovely are the Puritans. . .but they are the backbone of our race.’Footnote 17 Gilbert's pieces for the Lincolnshire Echo spell out in places Gilbert's rural origins and personal inclinations. He writes of a visit to the factories in the city: ‘A mere walk, however extended, through the foundries is but a mockery; for one could take a week to any department. The whole affair’, he adds, ‘is staggering to a countryman.’Footnote 18 This said, far more striking are other features that are typical of his writing: his general political awareness, a frank and passionate expression of local context and his deep concern for the social conditions arising out of economic change. Such dimensions are characteristic of his sympathetic and satirical, while not sentimental, writing.
It is uncertain whether Bernard Gilbert entered into any form of contractual arrangement with the Echo, for example, whether he was commissioned to write a series, and if there was any understanding determining the tone of the contents. In a few sections, Gilbert indicates that he was attempting to, or was perhaps required to, resist from expressing personal political opinion – as he had in his earlier pamphlets. In one of the articles he writes:
All the real matters – the vital questions, such as the future of the Labour Movement and Trades Unionism, the Insurance Act, Labour Exchanges, the rights and wrongs of capital, the coming demand for a universal living wage coupled with the abolition of charity, the incidence of Tariff Reform upon wages and unemployment and all the rest – I cannot deal with, because they involve taking a definite side which I have avoided in the ‘Impressions’ as far as possible; seeking only to give the result of my observation.Footnote 19
However, it is clear that Gilbert found it difficult to exclude political comment and partiality. In the same article, he turns to a discussion of the need to reconcile capital and Labour, and, while not prescribing a solution for the British context, drifts into a brief overview of Australian politics and its progress towards greater democratic representation of labour interests.Footnote 20 Elsewhere, Gilbert is far more direct. His views on particular areas of political reform surface, and he points towards the groups or interests with whom his sympathies lie. On universal adult suffrage, for example, he argues: ‘It is not the wealthy widow wanting an equal voice with her groom, nor the political woman demanding a vote with a hatchet, but the wretched woman who waits outside the Public Houses, or starves with her children, that arouses my anger, and spurs my determination as a Suffragist.’Footnote 21
Biographical information on Gilbert is fairly scant. He is best known for his dialect poetry, but his literary legacy, regionally and nationally, is overshadowed by that of the fellow Lincolnshire-born writer, Alfred Lord Tennyson. This article is one of a number aiming to draw Gilbert's literature out of undue neglect and bring his publications to a wider readership.Footnote 22
Gilbert on politics, civic identity and municipal policy in Lincoln in 1914
For this research, attention turns to 6 of Gilbert's 19 articles, ones which explore and explain most fully the nature of local politics, civic culture and urban development in Lincoln just before World War I: ‘Civic pride’, ‘Labour’, ‘Labour – continued’, ‘The water tower’, ‘The future’ and ‘The soul of Lincoln’.Footnote 23 The analysis of these articles begins with the penultimate piece, ‘The future’, for this contains the most substantive discussion of the critical pressures bearing upon the city in 1914. Gilbert remarks upon the outstanding and accelerating growth of the city's population: 7,000 in 1801, 20,000 in 1861 and 60,000 in 1911. This expansion was not just physical, but had implications for the city's identity and perception of itself. He observed somewhat foresightedly:
If one includes the natural city, taking in the continuous houses – the parishes soon to be absorbed – there must be nearly 70,000 already. This is an accelerating growth, the curve slopes upward, and if the rate of the last ten years is maintained Lincoln will soon be in sight of a hundred thousand, at which it would call itself one of England's great towns, instead of merely ‘a cathedral city’.Footnote 24
Lincoln's population doubled over the four decades following the census year of 1831. It would then almost double again during the 30 years between 1871 and 1901, with the 1870s being the decade of most marked expansion. Moreover, growth at a rate above the national average would be sustained subsequently, during the early to mid-twentieth century.Footnote 25 Lincoln's growth struck Gilbert, so much so that he elaborates upon it and its causes in a wider geographical context:
the tendency is for the countryside to draw into the towns, and a time may come when the farms will be almost deserted and when agricultural labourers – or rather agricultural mechanics sleeping in the city will speed to their farm work in swift motor-’buses along the rubber-faced roads. . .It may be so; it has been predicted; the town is magnetic enough with its amusements, companionship, and, above all the evening-life for its workers. The population of England (and indeed of all Europe and the United States) is flocking citywards, with accelerating speed. . .and if nothing comes to check it, the emptying of the countryside is only a matter of time.Footnote 26
Gilbert continues, indicating a possible solution for such demographic pressures:
On the other hand there is a strong movement to resettle the country, to cut up our great estates and farms, and generally carry folks ‘back to the land’. People are realising that the city slums are not the best breeding ground for a sturdy race, and in the coming generation we shall see concerted attempts to stem the rural exodus.Footnote 27
Gilbert makes reference in ‘The future’ to the work of Seebohm Rowntree, industrialist and philanthropist, and his prescription of new continental practices in town planning, including the redistribution of population from crowded centres and its relocation to the urban–rural fringe.Footnote 28 It is evident that, for Gilbert, the back-to-the-land agenda was not just a way of resolving rural issues and tackling the depopulation of the countryside. For the city of Lincoln, its industrial workers were the key to progress, and it is they who should be the beneficiaries of urban expansion, related resettlement and more generous accommodation:
it is the workers and the money that they earn and spend that is the great factor in the making of modern Lincoln. It is fifteen thousand working men with from one to three pounds a week who keep affairs astir, and in the next generation they will affect Lincoln much more than they have done. . .We might live to see Lincoln dispersed over a radius of ten miles. Granted a good cottage, and a piece of land – be it a large garden, allotment, or a small holding – and a motor-bus service, I daresay many thousands of Lincoln workers would spread out in some manner such as this; a movement that would alter the destiny of the place.Footnote 29
In ‘The future’, therefore, Gilbert draws upon a number of prevailing discourses that were providing an impetus for the emergence of more interventionist town and country planning: the resolution of the land question through property redistribution, or at least the resettlement of people into the countryside; the remediation of the social ills of urban living that had arisen as an outcome of supposed economic progress; the regeneration of the much-neglected rural economy and society; and the cultivation of a nostalgic yearning for the recreation of idealized, pre-industrial and pre-urban structures and relations. Gilbert's arguments align with the opinion, gradually swelling through the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, favouring the development of state-housing policy, a view blending idealistic thought with pragmatic reaction.Footnote 30
Gilbert discusses the state of Lincoln and its inhabitants, and causal processes bringing pressure, in two further articles on ‘Labour’ and ‘Labour – continued’. In the second, he compares Lincoln's situation with that elsewhere, and strikes a less critical note than in ‘The future’. Lincoln's economy, with foundry manufacture still dominant and successful, had given rise to working conditions that warranted some admiration:
My general impression of Lincoln's industrial class is one of comfort. They seem to be pretty well provided for. The city's trade steadily increases, there is little unemployment, hardly any casual labour (in the proper term), and, as far as I can gather, practically any man of average ability can earn a living wage. When I say this I do not forget the poverty that exists among certain underpaid men; but I am comparing Lincoln partly with what I know of other towns. . .Taking the able bodied workers of Lincoln, I certainly think their position is not uncomfortable.Footnote 31
The dominance of engineering in Lincoln in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, including its ability to respond at a major level to the demands for munitions during World War I, meant relative prosperity for the town into the 1920s – although uncertainty and decline would set in soon afterwards. Moreover, although confrontational labour relations did develop in the early twentieth century, these were generally limited when compared to the scale of working-class protest evident elsewhere.Footnote 32 ‘I would like to say here’, Gilbert observes, ‘that on every hand I hear a good word for the employers in Lincoln’, adding: ‘It is a good omen for the city's future.’Footnote 33 Gilbert makes no reference to the mass demonstrations, rioting and looting that came to a head in August 1911, which required suppression by armed troops; a local reflection of a more general heightening of class consciousness and conflict in this period.Footnote 34 Perhaps, for Gilbert, tensions had eased sufficiently in the two years between this event and his move to Lincoln. Gilbert, in the same article, also shows an awareness of the housing situation in the city in terms of levels of overcrowding and private-rental rates. His tone here, though, is not especially alarmist, claiming that the remedying of the deficiencies that did exist appeared to be readily achievable:
The number of houses in Lincoln on March 21st, 1912, was 13,568. . .In 77 houses overcrowding (in the official sense) exists. . .There are no large slums in Lincoln, and a bold hand might clear away what there are. . .Rents seem high for workers, and this, I suppose, is inevitable with the steady rise in population. It is proposed that the city shall build a considerable number of houses which should relieve matters. . .Some foundrymen – it is estimated a thousand – live in villages around Lincoln, up to a radius of five miles, but mostly because of the lack of houses in the city.Footnote 35
Some official accounts also support the view that housing conditions were not that pressing, or at least were not foremost among the factors causing general public ill health and requiring municipal action. It was not that critical accounts of the conditions within Lincoln's slums were absent, but the problems associated with housing were linked more to levels of rent and the availability of accommodation. It was matters of poor water supply that had attracted notoriety.Footnote 36 Gilbert does not appear to identify much evidence of, or grounds for, working-class pressure for reform. However, it appears that he was still of the view that intervention was required on behalf of labour, noting the emerging proposals for council-house provision. In ‘The future’, if not in his articles on ‘Labour’, he is in fact quite indicting and calls more forcefully for policy making. Demographic pressures demanded planned and radical responses, declaring that:
What Lincoln seems to need is a Town Planning Committee – or perhaps it is town planning citizens that are wanted. I must give the Council credit for some of their recent achievements, like the Public Library and the Water Tower. Still, there it is! A mass of slums and crooked streets want dynamiting. . .After all, what really matters is not the shops nor the mansions. The houses of the servant-owning class are of no importance (so far as the future is concerned) compared with the workers and their homes. Are they all going to get a living wage? Are the slums to be cleared away? Are the hundreds of workmen's cottages, that are rising like mushrooms, going to have a decent garden and a bathroom?Footnote 37
In two other articles, Gilbert discusses the city's record in terms of municipal provision. An article entitled ‘Civic pride’ considers the subject of the city's new library. Gilbert is evidently impressed. The design had not succumbed to the demands for compromise and economy that typified municipal enterprise, and it stood unusually as a city building that ranked well alongside those to be found elsewhere. Gilbert also evaluates another area of action and its related architectural structure in ‘The water tower’, and reflects more expansively on the nature of local civic culture. Lincoln's council was not known for its municipal activity. Its library, for a city of Lincoln's size, was a relatively late-built civic asset. Its improvement of water supplies, meanwhile, scandalously lagged behind demand and standards, with action forced upon it following 131 deaths from typhoid in 1904–05. This prompted a marked, if belated, turn towards interventionism in local policy making, a cultural shift acknowledged in contemporary accounts as well as in more recent histories.Footnote 38 In ‘The water tower’, Gilbert articulates with poignancy the connection between the typhoid scandal and a new orientation towards municipal engagement in civic improvement. He in fact elaborates at length upon the literal and metaphorical significance of the water tower, a structure that had joined the medieval castle and cathedral, standing on top of the ridge above the lower and greater part of the city:
The tower is a symbol of more than water. It challenges the Castle and Cathedral in more ways than one; for it is a token of the new spirit. We still build Castles, or what is the modern equivalent in Dreadnoughts, and occasionally we achieve a new Minster, but our faith is in the future instead of the past. . .We can no longer, in cities, play hazard with our share. Lincoln has had a sharp lesson, and her wounds are hardly healed. It is well that these pipes should bear the fountain of life to our lips instead of a darker cup.Footnote 39
As Gilbert notes in ‘The future’, the city's council was also just turning its attention to a further area of municipal enterprise to follow up on its enhancements to library provision and water supply: public housing. This intervention is perhaps surprising given the lower levels of concern that surrounded housing conditions in the city in the early twentieth century. Moreover, Lincoln was also quite unusual in acting in the area of housing at this point, ahead of most local authorities. Lincoln would establish a Housing and Town Planning Committee, answering the calls of Gilbert and others, and this would be a decisive element in bringing intervention. The council had come to accept the need for major local-authority provision, approving some 900 homes across 65 acres. It would receive central government approval for the scheme, secure a loan and fund land purchase before the outbreak of World War I. The first 200 homes, if delayed by the war years until 1920, are a legacy of what was being aspired to in Lincoln pre-1914, and their generous specifications would probably have satisfied what Gilbert was envisaging in his vision for ‘The future’. The homes reflect the garden-suburb spirit, with ample proportions and plots, and quasi-rustic lines. The city would go on to propose major housing developments inter-war as part of a grand development plan. In a county where local policy restraint was the norm, Lincoln's expenditure on this particular area of municipal responsibility stood out.Footnote 40
Lincoln's sudden swing from a culture of entrenched inaction to being a model of intervention, most evidently in housing provision, is quite striking in national terms. Most local authority housing schemes would await the supports and incentives that would follow after World War I. The activities of councils like Lincoln's cannot be understood simplistically, that is, as an expression of local party-political structures and relations and their influence. There were certainly local authority areas in which there was a strong and readily discernible causal interconnection between local party-political identities, central-party agendas and local-policy initiatives. However, there were places where local-policy needs and senses of civic duty opened up alternative factions within dominant, ruling parties, from the interventionist to the non-interventionist. There were, furthermore, local authorities that were not known for party-political extremism, and the local adoption of municipal action was not necessarily associated with conspicuous shifts in party-political structures. Party politics could in fact be downplayed, with a local tradition of non-affiliation strong. Moreover, particular personalities, and the degree to which councillors or their patrons were reformist in their inclinations, could be clearer and more relevant than any party allegiance. In addition, the commercial or business interests of local leaders may have had a greater part to play than party.Footnote 41
Historians agree that Lincoln's shift towards municipal action was quite late, but appreciable when it finally materialized – most especially with regard to housing. Its genesis is to be found in complex and nuanced readings of the role of individuals, local-political parties and other organizations. Reform might have been an inevitability, a product of deterministic central-local relations, but local-political cultures were clearly essential in determining the scale and speed of policy implementation The significance of personalities can be highlighted in Lincoln's case, with swift decision making and the building of a cross-party consensus owing much to the skill of a particular Liberal councillor, Clement Newsum. Local party-political composition was of importance, but the ability of particular individuals to overcome civic cultures appeared to be instrumental in the adoption of action.Footnote 42 Historians also acknowledge the influence of external organizations. An independent and voluntary Public Welfare Committee, chaired by the dean of Lincoln Cathedral, pressed for intervention. Meanwhile, a Trades and Labour Council would also call for policy making, petitioning for more working-class housing and achieving representation through the election of a socialist councillor. The construction of housing schemes for Lincoln also had the specific and added attraction of being an opportunity to extend municipal boundaries and authority.Footnote 43
Gilbert does consider the political structures and relations in the city. His concluding article for the Lincolnshire Echo, ‘The soul of Lincoln’, is devoted entirely to an examination of the city's culture and governance. In the piece Gilbert claims that he had found the ‘body’ of Lincoln in the form of its buildings and the human figures that comprise its populace, and had articulated this through his preceding articles. On seeking the city's ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, though, he continues:
I have sought Lincoln's spirit everywhere, in the Minster and all places where spiritual influences are likely to exist, but I felt it more strongly than anywhere in the beautiful Guildhall. There, if anywhere, is the soul of Lincoln, there, where the City Fathers meet to guide and guard its fortunes; for the past and present are intermingled with the living in that ancient shell. . .Here, then, is Lincoln: its very soul!Footnote 44
Gilbert proceeds to place Lincoln in a wider context, as an exemplar of broader-ranging and ideal processes. In this city, faith could, or certainly ought to, be placed in its local government and democratic representation: ‘These City Councils are more representative of their constituents than our Parliament. Women may vote, the elections are not necessarily fought upon political lines, and any man of note or worth, in a city like Lincoln, who does public service and desires public life, may attain Council rank.’Footnote 45 Moreover, the city's culture was also one that lent itself towards, and represented a mirror of, progress:
A young soul bursting its olden bands, a new spirit striving through ancient ways, the Twentieth Century emerging from the cradle of the Twelfth; that is Lincoln – one everlasting compromise. . .Not only is compromise the soul of Lincoln, but of England also, the very essence of our race; its inner spark of genius that guides us through the ages; and whilst it remains, our cities and our country will never fall to the earth.Footnote 46
Gilbert does not get drawn into discussing particular local political parties or policies in this concluding article. He had declared that it was the intention in the 19 articles to resist expressing explicitly personal political allegiances and opinions, and he appears to succeed here. Instead, he focuses on the nature of civic culture and general attitudes towards tradition and progress. It is evident that Gilbert indicates his own liking for political reform and advance. However, moving to Lincoln in 1914, he has found a city which, by this date, was reaching a worthy and effective compromise between continuity and change. It is in this final article that Gilbert is found at his least critical and most ‘boosterist’; his other articles are generally positive, but here he gives himself over most to celebration and optimism.
In a broader sense, his articles, and most especially ‘The soul of Lincoln’, are typical of the age in which Gilbert was writing. Their content supports one of the well-established interpretations of this period, that it witnessed a heyday for both municipal socialism and utopianism in town-planning ideology. His articles form something of a model of sophisticated civic-culture discourse. They contain many of the themes that characterize place-boosting literature: local distinctiveness and pre-eminence, the worth of industry and commerce, the purpose of municipal governance and political authority, rootedness in ancient traditions and values and outstanding and pioneering construction and improvement.Footnote 47 Gilbert was evidently making a pledge of faith in what local-state interventionism was offering to deliver, and also investing hope in what the idealism of early town planning was promising.
Conclusion
Studies of boosterism typically consider the role of place-promotional discourse in relation to the course of development of particular towns and cities. The art of the booster is contextualized with reference to: evolving civic cultures, factions and interests; municipal policy making and entrepreneurial action; and the representative function of contemporary media. However, close examinations of individual boosters themselves, and their connection with their home cities, appear to be relatively lacking. This study has sought to shed light on the special qualities of boosterism by bringing personal biography, that of Gilbert’s, into the investigation as much as ‘urban biography’, that of Lincoln.
Buried in the writings of the boosters there is an enormous mass of invaluable material for the historian, and the civic pride which they demonstrated is just as interesting an urban phenomenon to study as the social problems of the city which have captured most attention from general historians. The main difficulty with the literature is that it is totally uncritical. And it was never counterbalanced by the kind of ‘muck-raking’ literature about ‘the shame of the cities’.Footnote 48
Gilbert was no ‘muck raker’, but neither was he solely a booster. Gilbert's articles, and indeed local-newspaper media more broadly, are especially appealing as a historical source for they illustrate how objective critical observation and boosterist sentiment blended with one another in the early twentieth century. Gilbert, as critic and booster, wrote reports that were partial and subjective by their very nature, and aspects of their content invite further investigation and contextualization, in particular: Lincoln's planning problems and the causal factors bringing about municipal intervention; the prevalence of reformist, radical or utopian language in the Lincolnshire Echo and elsewhere; and the nature of the city's civic culture in the early twentieth century. Nonetheless, Gilbert offers a lucid, evocative and emphatic, if singular, impression of the condition of the city in 1914, the character of its politics and governance, and what its municipal-reform priorities should be.
In certain respects, the Lincoln case and the articles of Gilbert serve to mirror circumstances to be found elsewhere. It was a city that appeared to succumb to generally prevailing and centrally derived pressures. Particular development processes unravelled in Lincoln in much the same way as they did in other provincial centres. Clearly, however, local factors did give a certain character to how inevitable outcomes were arrived at. The city's sudden embrace of council-house building before World War I, for example, stands out as being relatively distinctive and unusual in terms of national trends. A complex array of motives, from the pragmatic to the utopian, was driving such policy responses, and study of the decisions by councils and of contemporaneous representations in the press reveal much about the essence of local civic character, culture and discourse in the early twentieth century.Footnote 49 The writings of Bernard Gilbert are a particularly inviting medium through which to explore the contextual complexity, and how the processes of expediency and idealism, and of the generally ranging and the locally distinctive, fused.
For Gilbert, his engagement with description of urban life proved to be fleeting, as was his writing for newspapers. Upon returning to full-time writing after the war, he concerned himself primarily with the rural scene. His civic-boosterist phase had passed. He did not swing towards ‘muck raking’, but he was certainly critical. When he wrote of cities, it was in bleaker and more despairing terms. He would revisit the back-to-the-land agenda, but no longer saw the improvement of cities as one of the ways forward. ‘White men have crammed themselves in to cities’, he wrote in 1923, ‘and deserve all that has happened to them’. Gilbert also asked ‘What's wrong with the city?’, answering: ‘that it is a city; that it is not the country; that man is not ready to leave the cradle of his youth’. Furthermore, in a ‘Credo’, he went as far as anticipating a future ‘when the cities and their smoke have cleared away’.Footnote 50 In addition, Gilbert was no longer hopeful for a better future under municipal socialism, and veered towards a more reactionary view of political systems and forms of governance. In his Old England: A God's Eye View of a Village of 1921, he remarks: ‘It is the ancient democracy of the Feudal System, the one which has stayed longest in our history and which has its roots deeper and more firmly in the soil of Old England than town-dwellers can guess or know.’Footnote 51 The change in the direction and tone of Gilbert's writings paralleled general processes. Reaction against the urban, the industrial and the modern became a more prominent theme in the work of leading ruralist authors through the early twentieth century. In addition, the inter-war years saw a weakening of municipal socialism's force, a steady withdrawal of middle-class elites from engagement with civic governance, and a lessening of provincial-press interest in local-political activity and urban progress.Footnote 52
