In nineteenth-century Britain, ahead of the rest of the world in economic development, many towns and cities grew to a size that only London had attained before. This volume focuses on the intellectual and controversial response of the period's leading men and women to the key issues of urbanization and its surrounding social problems. The extracts selected date from 1785 to 1909, and are drawn from the writings, reports and speeches of admirers of city life and its most passionate critics, optimists and alarmists, advocates of back-to-the-land panaceas, and reformers who aspired to control and reform cities. Contemporaries quoted include Dickens, Cobbett, Carlyle, Disraeli, Engels, Mrs Gaskell, Ruskin, Joseph Chamberlain, William Morris, Charles Booth, H.G. Wells and Seebohm Rowntree. In a valuable introduction the editor indicates the main preoccupations of the debate abotu the city, proposes a periodization for it, adn shows its connections with other controversies and issues, as Victorian Britain found itself entering an 'age of great cities'.This book was first published in 1973.

Introduction; Part 1 To the 1820s: The proliferation of the wens; Chapter 1 God made the country, 1785; Chapter 2 The strife of singularity, 1805; Chapter 3 Sleeping upon gunpowder, 1807; Chapter 4 The rise and fall of imperial London, 1811; Chapter 5 Every parish a little commonwealth, 1820; Chapter 6 The principle of locality, 1821; Chapter 7 All-devouring wens, 1821-30; Chapter 8 The prevailing resort to towns, 1825; Part 2 From the 1820s to 1848: Passion and Part isanship; Chapter 9 Defective order, 1829; Chapter 10 The natural progress of society, 1830-1; Chapter 11 Accidental evils and municipal regulation, 1832; Chapter 12 Part s of Nature's plan, 1840; Chapter 13 The miseries of Earth, 1840-1; Chapter 14 Removable circumstances, 1842; Chapter 15 Not a fair specimen, 1842; Chapter 16 The spirit of the age, 1843; Chapter 17 Contravening supply-and-demand, 1843-50; Chapter 18 A peculiar need of Christianity, 1844; Chapter 19 The type of some great idea, 1844; Chapter 20 The social war, 1845; Chapter 21 Aggregation without association, 1845; Chapter 22 Always towards the town, 1846-8; Chapter 23 Rabid politics, 1848; Part 3 Three From 1848 to the 1880s: Acceptance and optimism; Chapter 24 The power of ancient architecture, 1849; Chapter 25 The poetry of London, 1850; Chapter 26 The river of Time, 1852; Chapter 27 Without natural police, 1852; Chapter 28 Fact and fancy, 1854; Chapter 29 Proud of belonging to a town, 1854-5; Chapter 30 Energy and public spirit, 1855; Chapter 31 Treating the causes, 1857; Chapter 32 The Goddess of Getting-on, 1865-9; Chapter 33 The idea of the State, 1869; Chapter 34 Appealing to voluntary action, 1871; Chapter 35 The dignity of the municipality, 1874-6; Chapter 36 Utopia-another word for time, 1876; Chapter 37 The backbone of the nation, 1877-81; Part 4 From the 1880s: The doubts return; Chapter 38 An exceeding bitter cry, 1883; Chapter 39 The largest Chapter of human accidents, 1886-8; Chapter 40 A city of the damned, 1889; Chapter 41 The Clearing of Misery, 1890; Chapter 42 The absorbing interest of a battle-field, 1892; Chapter 43 The breath of social life, 1894; Chapter 44 Marrying town and country, 1898; Chapter 45 The new tyranny of cities, 1899; Chapter 46 The problem of the coming race, 1901; Chapter 47 Deflecting the Titan forces, 1901; Chapter 48 Great searchings of heart, 1901; Chapter 49 Centrifugal possibilities, 1901; Chapter 50 The aggregate of vitality and expansion, 1902; Chapter 51 The triumph of artificial circumstance, 1903; Chapter 52 Evolving Eu-topia, 1905; Chapter 53 The tyranny of the present, 1909;