upon citizens of Birmingham. The history of Birmingham in the ensuing years of Joseph Chamberlain’s mayoralty (1873-6) is considered almost universally in the literature as one of ‘municipal revolution’; within these three years the ‘Town [had been] parked, paved, assized, marketed, gas-and-watered and improved’.1 Chamberlain’s civic achievements transformed Birmingham, famously leading an American writer Julien Ralph to describe it as ‘the best-governed city in the world’.2 But what basis did Ralph have for his description? More than fifty corporations had municipalised gas before Birmingham, even its largest provincial rival Manchester had achieved this feat as early as 1817, and an even greater number of taken control of their water supplies.3 However, even if Birmingham was not the first to implement a municipalising agenda, it was the first to attribute a philosophical voice to such proceedings; elevating such policies ‘above sheer pragmatism and invest[ing] the dull business... with a profoundly ethical dimension’.4 When Chamberlain’s mayoralty was over, and he entered national politics, he often reflected upon his civic achievements and implored his colleagues that ‘increased responsibilities bring with them a higher sense of the dignity and importance of municipal work’.5 Yet this sense of ‘altruistic’ or ‘enlightened’ responsibility was learned not from Chamberlain’s political contemporaries, initially as a Liberal politician and later as a Unionist, but from the strong tradition of religious dissent which was uniquely prevalent within the society of Birmingham.6 The examination of two artefacts, George Dawson’s speech on the inauguration of Birmingham Reference Library (1866) and the architecture of Joseph Chamberlain’s Improvement Scheme, as seen in a drawing of 1886 by H.W. Brewer for the Graphic magazine, enables us to understand the genesis of such ideas. Furthermore, the artefacts explain how the moral lessons and improving tenets associated with the Civic Gospel soon came to be used to justify and legitimise the increasingly entrepreneurial enterprises of civic reformers of the Chamberlain period.
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