Image and reality: Two Nottinghamshire market towns in late georgian England

There is an image of the market town, particularly from the eighteenth century, as a traditional, somnolent community. Like Thomas Hardy’s Casterbridge (thought to be Dorchester), these places are portrayed as oldfashioned, without the faintest ‘sprinkle of modernism’, intimately linked tothe life and fortunes of their surrounding rural hinterland, where, to useHardy’s words, ‘country and town met at a mathematical line’. For example, Marshall writing onIndustrial England 1776-1851has highlighted what shesees as the distinction between an old and new urban England from the lateeighteenth century: English towns can be divided into those that look forward to the future and those that look back to the past. Foremost in the first category were the great industrial towns and the growingindustrial villages of the Midlands and North. It was there the new patterns of urban life werebeing worked out. Representative of the past were such cities as Bristol and Norwich … andthe host of small market towns, which were little more than the surrounding countryside. © 1992 Maney Publishing.